South Carolina Upset Connecticut, But Not As Much As Dawn Staley Upset Geno Auriemma

You can generally read a whole worldview into the person doing it and feel confident about those assumptions being correct. But it's different for coaches, or anyway there are ways in which it theoretically could be that work to get them off the hook somewhat. The specific acts of hopping-mad clownishness are still just what they appear to be, of course, but the heightened emotional register and general overage of college basketball create a context that could, again theoretically, be exonerating. Look at Tom Izzo huffing and puffing like a bagpiper on the sidelines and you might be able to convince yourself that he just cares so much about these kids that he has forgotten himself a little. Squint harder than that and you can see Mick Cronin going out of his way to humiliate his own players as a reflection of how much he respects the game. Squint and twist as hard as you can, really bear down, and it's honestly still tough to do much with Dan Hurley constantly acting like Christopher Meloni in Oz but someone will surely find a way to figure that one out. Coaches are the main characters of college basketball because they stay in one place the longest, and also because of an unfortunate cultural default towards whichever older white guy is screaming the most. This has its benefits and its costs, but over a long enough period it has the effect of turning those coaches into caricatures, and finally into cartoons. It was not really surprising that Geno Auriemma responded poorly to Connecticut's upset loss to South Carolina in the women's Final Four on Friday night, both because the defeat ended Connecticut's perfect season and 54-game winning streak, and because Geno Auriemma is the way he is. Coaches are only human, but Geno Auriemma is also only going to do Geno Auriemma-type stuff. He will do it both because he cares so much and competes so hard and because he is, if you want to be nice about it, Geno Auriemma.