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- I Was Completely Cooked
With an Elite 8 full of first, second, and third seeds, the 2025 edition of Men’s March Madness was without a Cinderella story.
That opened the door for the main storyline of the tournament to be a head coach completely losing the plot. Not just any head coach, either. The two-time defending national champion head coach.
After nearly upsetting #1 Florida, University of Connecticut head coach Dan Hurley was caught on camera shouting "I hope they don't f*** you like they f**ed us!" to the Baylor players who were waiting to play the next game.
Hurley’s meltdown and extraordinary loss of perspective became the lead story and gave new meaning to March Madness. The coach’s erratic behaviour had been bubbling all season, stemming back to a poor early-season tournament in Maui, but now it was global news.
In his forthcoming book Never Stop: Life, Leadership, and What It Takes To Be Great, due out on September 30, Hurley sheds some light on how the incident was endemic of larger problems, and nearly caused him to walk away.
Here is an excerpt of the book, which was published by The Athletic:
"I knew my mind, and I knew my body, and I could feel that I was completely cooked. Just burnt. I didn't even know how I was standing. I stared at the office walls, muttering, conducting a brutal review of our season. I didn't build a strong enough roster. I wasn't a good leader. I lost control, emotionally, at various points. I came in here some days sad and defeated, when I needed to be positive and inspiring. Then I went through the self-lacerating what-ifs: What if we'd played a little bit better in Maui? What if we hadn't blown that game against Seton Hall? What if we'd been a better seed than an eight seed and hadn't needed to face a number one in the second round? Who knows?
It was unhealthy to be ruminating this way. I was unhealthy. I desperately needed to get out of town, flee to my standard hideaway, Dorado Beach in San Juan. I needed to do some healing, not think about basketball for a few days. But that wasn't possible in this new era. The transfer portal and NIL deals made every college player a free agent, so right after the tournament I needed to be in my office. If I left town right then, I wouldn't have a team for the 2025-26 season. At that point, I wasn't even sure that I would return for the 2025-26 season."
When I see incidents like this, I come back to the same question: How does this keep happening?
How much information do we need? How many more elders of coaching do we need to warn us of the pitfalls? How are we not learning?
One clue is that the type of person who writes a book called ‘Don’t Stop’ is probably susceptible to unhealthy and obsessive behaviours.
A second clue is that the money makes the trade-off worth it. A lot of coaches use their salary to justify burning themselves out, forgetting that a 10-bedroom house gets mighty quiet after about eight months of sitting at home on your own.
Now, I’m not prominent enough or arrogant enough to assume my work has found its way to all corners of the sporting landscape, nor am I the only person doing work that aims to solve this problem, but I do have some data that allows me to point to a third clue.
There is a short but distinguished collection of sports where I’ve never received a single message from a coach: the National Football League, college football, and college basketball.
Whenever I’ve done keynotes at major colleges, the football and basketball coaches get left off the meeting invite. The administrators have given up on even trying to persuade them to come and listen.
There are just certain sports who think they’re doing fine (…and ironically, they tend to be the ones where burnout repeatedly occurs).
My points here are simple:
It doesn’t need to be like this, and the trade-off isn’t worth it
Running away to Dorado Beach in San Juan doesn’t make burnout go away (they’ve researched this many times over)
‘Completely cooked’ is only great when eating chicken, not when coaching