2010 Cincinnati Bearcats Basketball: Cincinnati vs Connecticut

There's no getting around the ugly, grisly truth of the matter: Unless they can win five games in New York City in the second week of March, the Connecticut Huskies will not make the NCAA Division I Men's Basketball Tournament this season.

An ugly home loss to the Cincinnati Bearcats in a sluggish Saturday performance ensures that UConn won't have enough of a resume to satisfy a bunch of stat-crunching, data-munching evaluators in an Indianapolis war room roughly one month from now. This train wreck against Cincy showed that the Huskies' coaching situation has had nothing to do with their problems in an enormously disappointing season.

Yes, Jim Calhoun came back to the bench at the XL Center in Hartford, after missing just under four weeks due to what doctors referred to as short-term health concerns free from life-threatening dimensions. However, the reappearance of a Hall of Fame coach did not translate into a transformed identity for a ballclub that's been dragging and flagging all season long. Interim head coach and Calhoun assistant George Blaney tried to push the right buttons during his time as the head Husky, but when the boss man returned to the sidelines in this must-win game for his program, UConn didn't improve. If anything, the Huskies regressed relative to their near-upset of Syracuse on Wednesday.

Just how lackluster was Connecticut in this game? For one thing, the Huskies scored just six points in the first 11 and a half minutes of the second half. That's not a misprint: six in 11.5 minutes. That level of offensive (in)efficiency would produce fewer than 30 points in a 40-minute game. Only when Cincinnati - leading comfortably and draining free throws in the endgame phase - let down its guard in the final minutes did UConn manage to score with any degree of consistency. Calhoun's kids, after managing only 14 points in the first 17 minutes of the second half, tallied 12 in the final three minutes to make the score remotely respectable (and even that's probably a stretch). The whole second half proved to be an offensive washout, a zero-sum disaster with no redeeming value whatsoever.

Tied into UConn's second-half woes, the Huskies produced another awful statistic on Saturday: Six players who stepped on the court, including starting big men Ater Majok and Alex Oriakhi, combined for a grand total of 1 point. That's correct: Five UConn players produced bagels, and a sixth posted a breadstick. Too many Huskies were dead weights on the floor in this game, providing Calhoun, Blaney, and the rest of the coaching staff with absolutely no value at all. Cincinnati got at least four points from seven different players, and it was that (comparatively) well-rounded set of contributions which enabled the blue-collar Bearcats to go into New England and prevail.

Last year, UConn revealed its staying power in the college basketball cosmos with another trip to the Final Four. This year, however, has been a wreck of a ride Jim Calhoun would very much like to forget.

Cincinnati vs Connecticut Basketball Recap