Dan Hurley at South Carolina? It almost happened, UConn basketball coach says

Gamecocks superfan Darius Rucker may have inadvertently helped stop one of the best coaches in college basketball from committing to South Carolina.

Yes, really.

UConn men’s basketball coach Dan Hurley, whose Huskies won a second straight national championship earlier this year, revealed on a podcast last month that he had an epic recruiting visit to USC as a high school prospect roughly 30 years ago … but decided against the school for his own good.

Speaking on a July 23 episode of “The Ryen Russillo Podcast,” Hurley, who’s widely considered one of the best coaches in the sport and turned down a contract from the Los Angeles Lakers this summer, said he was drawn to the Gamecocks in the early 1990s because they had an “incredible” group of coaches.

“George Felton was the head coach,” Hurley said. “You had Jimmy Black, you had Joe Dooley, you had Eddie Payne. That was a big-time staff there.”

South Carolina, at that point, was on the verge of joining the SEC but still playing in the Metro Conference. Felton, a former player, led the Gamecocks to four winning seasons and a 1989 NCAA Tournament appearance in his five years as coach from 1986-91.

Although the timing of Hurley’s recruiting trip to Columbia is unclear, it likely would’ve been at some point in 1989, 1990 or early 1991, when he was an upperclassman star point guard for his father, Bob Hurley, at the New Jersey basketball powerhouse St. Anthony and Felton (who was fired after the 1990-91 season) was still coaching at USC.

By all accounts, Hurley had a good time.

Just a little too good of a time.

“My last night of the visit was a Hootie & the Blowfish concert, which caused me to get on that airplane just incredibly hung over,” Hurley said on the podcast. “And I knew that there was no way physically that I could keep up with a Southern school from a party standpoint.”

Russillo, the podcast host, laughed.

“As a UVM attendee who also visited the South later in life, I walk and I just go, ‘I don’t know how anyone did this down there,’ ” Russillo said. “So we’re aligned on that one.”

Recruits rarely make college decisions off one visit or one specific factor. But Hurley, 51, intimated that while life at South Carolina — which, since joining the SEC, has only solidified its reputation among students as a tailgating and party school — would have been a blast, he may not have had the self-control to balance that with his then-budding basketball career.

After living it up at one of Hootie & the Blowfish’s earlier shows — the popular band was founded in Columbia in 1986 by Rucker, its eventual breakout star, and three other USC graduates — he said thanks but no thanks to South Carolina and eventually committed to Seton Hall.

Hurley revealed on Russillo’s podcast that he was considering another school in the area, too, but Davidson College outside Charlotte “scared the heck out of me” with its strict honor code.

“Once they explained to me how that worked, I felt like just coming from Jersey City and my academic background there, that that could be a tough one,” he said. “As much as I loved Matt Doherty, who was an assistant for Bob McKillop back then.”

Dan Hurley wasn’t as can’t-miss of a player as his older brother, Bobby, who also played point guard and was a consensus All-American and two-time NCAA champion at Duke under some of coach Mike Krzyzewski’s best Blue Devils team.

But he put together a solid career at Seton Hall, an in-state school, and had 1,070 career and 437 assists for the Big East’s Pirates while leading them to three NCAA Tournaments and an NIT appearance from 1991-96.

Hurley, listed at 6-foot-2, was a two-year starter at point guard and averaged 14.3 points, 5.2 assists and 2.3 steals per game as a senior for Seton Hall in 1995-96.

More intriguing in this hypothetical, though: What if Hurley wound up coaching at South Carolina at some point after playing there, and brought the same smarts that propelled him from the high school coaching ranks to Rhode Island and now UConn, where he’s churned out NBA players, cemented the Huskies’ blue blood status and won back-to-back national titles?

Thanks to his night with Hootie & the Blowfish, the world will never know.