CBS Sports’ Gary Parrish, a Memphis alum, couldn’t overcome his disappointment in the Tigers this football season. He let that feeling slip into his coverage of UConn head coach Dan Hurley’s acknowledgment of the chance for a Huskies three-peat this season.
“Coaches often talk about taking it ‘one game at a time’ and never looking ‘too far ahead’ while refusing to make any grand statements about anything. Just this week, Memphis football coach Ryan Silverfield said he couldn’t yet call his season a ‘failure’ even though his team is 7-2 against a nothing-schedule and unlikely to make the AAC title game despite being picked to win the conference in the preseason — but that’s crazy to me. If you don’t meet expectations in something, and there’s no obvious explanation for why you didn’t, you’ve failed,” Parrish wrote in the opposite of a love letter to Memphis head football coach Ryan Silverfield.
Hurley labeled any non-championship season at UConn a failure during his lauded speech.
“Our mindset going in is we want to go five for five with the championships,” Hurley said on ESPN earlier this week. “That’s what you come to UConn … to do, if you coach here, or you play here, and for me … and everyone associated with the program, any season that doesn’t end with us achieving championship goals for us, in our minds, is a failure here at UConn.”
Dan Hurley struggled at UConn before making the Huskies a multi-time national champion
Hurley’s success did not happen overnight in Storrs. It took a losing season and two postseason-less years, then two first-round March Madness eliminations, before the Huskies became back-to-back national champions.
Silverfield’s Tigers aren’t moving with an upward trajectory. It’s been ups and downs and stops and starts.
Parrish has every right to be frustrated with Memphis since his expectations are lower than national championship glory but he’s still not seeing a head coach bring his team close to those expectations.
Year five was Hurley’s first championship. Silverfield is nowhere close. Perhaps the expectations, and enforcing them, are what separate the two programs.
