As we push forward into July 2020, we are confronted with yet another piece of bad news that UConn being brought back into the Big East was not, in fact, a cruel joke at the expense of fans everywhere. To recap my distaste, the school is grasping onto their failure of a football program for dear life, the move was entirely dictated by nostalgia of spectators who grew up watching a men’s basketball program way more successful than the current iteration can dream of being, and they will demand more than they deserve in the future because of that. The re-addition of their women’s basketball team is a legitimate win for the conference, but it is outweighed by any one of those listed negatives.

Watching the same highlights of UConn being good to fill the void of witnessing their current basketball team live will be painful enough, but we now have to subject ourselves to the St. Louis Cardinals fans of college basketball. You would think that after eight seasons gone by that there would be not much left of Jim Calhoun’s dilapidated sexist corpse [Editor’s note: Still in the league!] to feast on, but my god do the people of Glastonbury or whatever seem to find a way. We can try to confuse them for a couple hours by handing them a blank map of the US and asking them to fill it out, but they might catch onto the trick after a few months before they move onto bragging about how they get to say to the world that they live close to New York without ever mentioning the effort that they have to go through to actually get to The Garden.

As our way of re-introducing ourselves to what we can get used to going forward and introducing some the younger Marquette fans out there to it, I thought it might be a good idea to reflect on UConn’s brief stint in the American Athletic Conference by going through their multitude of losses (and trust me, multitude is the right word) and listing the ones that made me laugh a lot. Hardly any of these losses are associated with a personal experience of watching them, because why the hell would I ever do that? I could barely make it through their matchups against Wichita State, and I’m a lifelong fan of the Shockers. The basis of this exercise will be me looking at the scores from the last 6 years and giving them a rating of how much I giggled at the outcome.

March 20, 2014: St. Joe’s - 81, UConn - 89 (OT)

Yes, this was a win in the scoreboard, but there’s no way to look at this other than a loss. This was the first round of the 2014 NCAA Tournament, which the Huskies ultimately won the whole shebang as a 7 seed. No one can look me in the eye and say that this title actually meant something while seeing this Hawks team that they barely scraped into the dance. St. Joe’s miracle win over VCU in the A-10 Tournament final that year was the only reason they even sniffed the tournament that year, and it took an and-one that fell into Amida Brimah’s lap for the game to even make it into overtime. So it’s a minor loss because of that blemish on the title run, but the ultimate “reward” of winning it all was completely masked by the program sticking by Kevin Ollie because of that while he continually took the team to the curb and stomped on its head.

Giggle Rating: 3/10, not enough immediate sadness. Good long term comedy payoff, though.

December 5, 2014: UConn - 44, Yale - 45

UConn scored 6 points in the first 10 minutes. This was the third loss in what turned into a four losses in five games stretch right after winning a championship. A great way to boost morale.

Giggle Rating: 5/10

January 13, 2015: UConn - 58, Tulsa - 66

I’m putting every loss to Tulsa in here because I love every bit of Frank Haith’s grifting ways. Also it’s fun to remind Connecticut fans that 1) they had to travel to Tulsa as a member of the AAC and 2) they often lost to Tulsa.

Giggle Rating: 4/10

February 1, 2015: UConn - 68, Houston - 70

Pffffffffffft. Houston was ranked TWO HUNDRED AND FOURTEENTH in KenPom at the end of that year, and were #252 when this game tipped off. The Cougars lost to #324 Arkansas Pine Bluff and #331 South Carolina State that year. Consecutively. At home. We forget that Kelvin Sampson took over a soggy hamburger bun of a program and leveraged that into building a consistent contender with a brand new arena. All backed by AAC paychecks, which is what UConn fans will tell you is the sole reason that the Huskies have sucked lately. Oh man I wish I could’ve watched this game. FUN FACT: UConn wasted a 31/8/2 from Ryan Boatright in this game.

Giggle Rating: 10/10

March 5, 2015: Memphis - 54, UConn - 53

Putting the date on this is important, because we have to differentiate between the losses to Memphis in this season. This is the one at home. Shaq Goodwin hit a game winner with 8 seconds left, but I couldn’t find a highlight of it on YouTube. I’m sure it was great, though. Completed a season sweep for a Tigers team that still thought Josh Pastner could coach.

Giggle Rating: 6/10

January 5, 2016: UConn - 53, Temple - 55

This was UConn’s third straight loss to the Owls in two years, and neither of those Temple teams were remotely good. Later this year they would make that 4 straight losses.

Giggle Rating: 6/10

January 14, 2016: UConn - 51, Tulsa 60

Told you the losses to Tulsa were going in. The road ones are always the funny ones. Tulsa had a late 14-2 run to wrap this up.

Giggle Rating: 4/10

March 11, 2016: UConn - 104, Cincinnati - 97 (4OT)

Just kidding. This AAC tournament game ruled. If you remember, Jalen Adams hit a three-quarters court shot at the end of triple overtime right after Cincy took the lead on a 3 of their own. But still, if that circus shot doesn’t go in they might have missed the tournament, as the Huskies made it in as a 9 seed thanks to earning the AAC’s automatic bid, so there’s some humor there.

Giggle Rating: 1/10

November 11, 2016: Wagner - 67, UConn - 58

It starts to get juicy here. This is where UConn began to launch their level of suck to the stratosphere. They took no time introducing that new brand to us in the first game of the year. UConn used a 12-0 run to tie the game at 49 with about seven minutes left and then hilariously fell apart.

Giggle Rating: 8/10

November 14, 2016: Northeastern - 64, UConn - 61

This was the second game of the year. UConn never led in the final 14 minutes.

Giggle Rating: 8/10

December 31, 2016: Tulsa - 61, UConn - 59

Shoutout Frank Haith. This was by far the worst team he’s ever coached.

Giggle Rating: 7/10

January 5, 2017: Memphis - 70, UConn - 61

Even worse than losing to Josh Pastner is losing to Tubby Smith.

Giggle Rating: 6/10

January 14, 2017: Georgetown - 72, UConn - 69

If you want an idea of how UConn’s time in the Big East is likely to go, here’s your answer. Just another “historically great” matchup between two teams who haven’t done squat in years battling in a rockfight in front of a less than two-thirds full Capital One Center but still getting the Fox broadcast because reasons. FUN FACT: This is the Georgetown team that got John Thompson III run out of town.

Giggle Rating: 1/10. The loss is funny, thinking about this circumstance made me upset.

March 1, 2017: East Carolina - 66, UConn - 62

East Carolina being in that conference is a legitimate gripe that I give to Huskies fans. They have no business being in any sort of national market. You should probably beat them like a drum, but alas.

Giggle Rating: 7/10

January 3, 2018: Tulsa - 90, UConn - 88 (2OT)

I’ll bet this was just as thrilling as the Syracuse six overtime Big East Tournament game. Or at least as the 72-63 loss at The Garden a month earlier.

Giggle Rating: 4/10

January 16, 2018: Memphis - 73, UConn - 49

Holy Christ. Look at that score again. Those two numbers combined don’t even reach Memphis’ KenPom ranking that year (161). God what a dump of a program. FUN FACT: This is the Memphis team that got Tubby Smith run out of town.

Giggle Rating: 9/10

January 20, 2018: Villanova - 81, UConn - 61

Yes, this was four days after getting shelled by Memphis. Do you think any Villanova fan felt the warm fires of old rivalries when they changed the channel to something more interesting after the 39-18 first half score?

Giggle Rating: 3/10

January 31, 2018: UCF - 70, UConn - 61

No, not the good UCF team. Connecticut rallied from down seven to tie the game at 50 with about six minutes left and then took the L.

Giggle Rating: 3/10

February 15, 2018: Tulsa - 73, UConn - 71

I’ll give them credit for giving the Golden Hurricane a run for their money before flying back to Oklahoma in a good mood. UConn actually led by seven with a bit more than two minutes to go before forgetting there was two minutes to go.

Giggle Rating: 4/10

February 25, 2018: Memphis - 83, UConn - 79

They even had revenge on their mind! They had a personal vendetta to play for! And they still couldn’t beat Tubby Smith, who would be fired 17 days later.

Giggle Rating: 8/10

December 2, 2018: Arizona - 76, UConn - 72

I forgot how bad Arizona was that year. Still couldn’t beat them, even at home.

Giggle Rating: 5/10

January 2, 2019: South Florida - 76, UConn - 68

At this point Tulane is the only AAC team the Huskies haven’t lost to.

Giggle Rating: 6/10

January 16, 2019: Tulsa - 89, UConn - 83

Love you, Frank.

Giggle Rating: 5/10

February 21, 2019: SMU - 77, UConn - 59

I decided to only pick one loss out of this stretch of 8 games during which they lost 7. The Ponies were trash this year and destroyed Dan Hurley’s first Huskies squad. Fun times. Well, fun for me, maybe not so much for Danny Boy.

Giggle Rating: 8/10

March 15, 2019: Houston - 84, UConn - 45

They almost got doubled up by the Cougars in a tournament setting, but hey, he has a good recruiting class in a couple years! We think!

Giggle Rating: 4/10

November 13, 2019: St. Joe’s - 96, UConn - 87

It all comes full circle, doesn’t it? This was the Hawks’ second ever game after longtime coach Phil Martelli left the program. The whole year was a mess for St. Joe’s, but presumably more so in the second game of the year against what should’ve been an improved UConn squad. Nine point win for the road team. I’m trying to decide if that’s more or less funny after St. Joe’s opened up the game on a 17-2 run.

Giggle Rating: 8/10

January 4, 2020: South Florida - 75, UConn - 60

Seth Greenberg coached South Florida? Don’t remember that.

Giggle Rating: 7/10

January 12, 2020: Wichita State - 89, UConn - 86 (2OT)

This actually wasn’t funny. I was really stressed. I was posted up at Harpo’s in Kansas City waiting for the Chiefs-Texans Divisional Round playoff game to start and I was already nervous so watching the entire Shockers team not be able to hit a damn free throw made everything worse. I mainly wanted to use this space to point out the Shocker’s 5-1 record against UConn since joining the AAC with mostly disappointing teams and the common talking point after those 5 wins was for people in Connecticut to say something along the lines of, “At least we’re not poor.” Great folks up there.

Giggle Rating: 2/10 because I expected these results rooting for a good team and all.

January 26, 2020: Tulsa - 79, UConn - 75 (OT)

Alright it’s actually starting to get weird how many of these matchups have been tight to the finish. If either of these teams were even remotely interesting, it’d be worth further discussion.

Giggle Rating: 8/10 because every one of these games has gone Tulsa’s way.

March 8, 2020: UConn - 80, Tulane - 76

This is the one true victory that fans in the 3 square mile area of Connecticut can hang their hats on. One happy memory they can talk about with their local Xanax dealer. They never lost to Tulane. Clap hands, squeal for joy, etc. The type of moral victory emblematic of the total drain that they put on their conference. What types of accomplishments can we expect once basketball resumes in the Big East? Maybe they’ll beat DePaul in the 6/11 Big East Tournament matchup. Maybe they’ll try to refer to Providence as a rival after beating them by 4 in a game shown on CBS Sports Network. The possibilities really are endless. Welcome to the Big East, UConn. Try not to get too comfortable.

Giggle Rating: 9/10