South Florida vs Connecticut Basketball Recap

On a day when Louisville definitely punched its NCAA Tournament ticket and Notre Dame took a big step toward the Big Dance, the other bubble teams in the Big East couldn't afford a slip-up.

The Connecticut Huskies found a banana peel, however, and after a devastating loss to the South Florida Bulls, last year's Final Four team is certainly headed for the NIT unless it can win at least four games in four days at the Big East Tournament in New York.

UConn - who must play in Tuesday's first round as a result of this loss - might be able to get back into the at-large conversation by making Saturday's Big East final, but anything short of that will surely result in a consolation tournament for a program that expects to go Dancing each and every season.

Just how did this basketball campaign slip away from coach Jim Calhoun's club after a string of very impressive wins against Villanova, Rutgers and West Virginia? Just how could UConn spit the bit in a must-win game at the USF Sun Dome after losing to Louisville and Notre Dame?

Evidently, there's a leadership vacuum on the Husky roster, because in the final stages of this throwdown against Coach Stan Heath's squad, the main men for UConn were not found on the floor. Regular starters Stanley Robinson, Ater Majok and Jerome Dyson did not receive crunch-time minutes from Calhoun and main assistant George Blaney. Even when UConn stared down a 63-52 deficit at the 5:35 mark of regulation and climbed within four points of USF with 3:41 left (65-60), the big guns did not get re-inserted into this make-or-break game for the Huskies. The message sent by Calhoun speaks volumes not just about the quality of UConn's play on Saturday, but about the mindset this team has exhibited for so much of the season.

While it's undeniably true that last year's Final Four squad had Hasheem Thabeet as a defensive anchor in the middle, and forward Jeff Adrien as a blue-collar performer who could hit 15-foot jumpers and rebound like a madman, it still stands that Connecticut's 2010 team owned the pieces needed to make an NCAA Tournament appearance. Kemba Walker is a shotmaking artist, and the people who had accompanied him in the starting lineup - Robinson and Dyson in particular - should have been able to hold up their ends of the bargain.

Evidently not.

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Robinson and Dyson - along with Majok and main reserve Gavin Edwards, who was also absent from the action in the final, fateful minutes of this game - performed so poorly that Calhoun viewed them to be beyond redemption. South Florida owns one superstar in Dominique Jones, who did score a team-high 20 points on 7-of-12 shooting, but the other players on the USF roster are not very distinguished. Yet, the Bulls shot 51 percent as a team against the Huskies, and that reality had to be the last straw for an evidently disgusted Calhoun, who seemed to welcome the technical foul he received with 10:34 left and UConn trailing, 54-42.

A team has imploded, and now Connecticut needs to win four games at the Big East Tournament just to have a chance for an at-large NCAA Tournament appearance. This is not how Jim Calhoun envisioned the 2010 season, a season that lies in tatters.

By Matt Zemek
DFN Sports Senior Staff Writer