Geno the graceless

The Blob once observed that if Notre Dame really wanted to win a national championship in football again, the school should hire women's basketball coach Muffet McGraw as its football coach. 

After all, she was the best coach on campus. And as a two-time national champion, she knew the way.

I point this out as full disclosure that this is a precinct with a definite Muffet McGraw bias. And so you should take that into account when I say what I have to say this morning.

Which is, Geno Auriemma is a graceless jerk.

He's also the best women's basketball coach in history not named Pat Summitt, and the dynasty he's built at UConn is perhaps the last true dynasty in American sport. It's also not a wholly owned subsidiary of ESPN, despite what Muffet said as a guest on Kate Fagan's and Jessica Smetana's podcast the other day.

Fagan and Smetana asked Muffet if UConn had an "outsized" influence on women's college basketball, and Muffet, now an analyst for the ACC Network, said absolutely it did. Of course, she then went on to say what UConn has done is "amazing," and how the Huskies are the standard for everyone else in college buckets (including for Notre Dame), and how everyone is trying  to "emulate" them.

That's when she stepped in it.

"But I think it goes over the top with ESPN," she said. "That is Connecticut's network. Notre Dame has NBC. Connecticut has ESPN."

OK, first off: The ACC Network is owned and operated by ESPN. So it's Muffet McGraw's network now, too.

Secondly, most of UConn's games are not broadcast by ESPN, but by SNY. And the conference tournament for the Big East, of which UConn is a member, is a Fox property, not an ESPN property.

All of which Auriemma pointed out in his rebuttal to McGraw's comments. And if he'd stopped there, he'd have been fine.

But Geno can't help being Geno. So he had to go full jerkwater.

"I guess Muffet's bored," he all but sneered. "I guess she doesn't have a whole lot to talk about. Usually when she was coaching, when she did talk, nobody listened anyway. I guess she figures she's got a platform now."

He didn't stop there, of course. He pointed out that 11 championships (UConn) are more than two (Notre Dame), because he learned that from Sesame Street. He even got in a shot at the Irish football program, saying, "I'm just glad we don't go 30 years between winning championships. So maybe NBC ought to help them a little more."

Look. I get it. Geno felt compelled to defend his program, even though Muffet praised his program to the skies. But then to get personal about it and say "nobody listened" when she talked as a coach at Notre Dame went beyond the pale -- something Auriemma's always been good at.

Not to mention he was as wrong as wrong gets. Plenty of people listened to Muffet McGraw when she was Notre Dame's coach.

The last time the Irish were in the Final Four, in 2019, for instance, someone asked about why she wasn't hiring men for her coaching staff anymore. And her answer was that there was no dearth of coaching opportunities for men in women's basketball, but there was for women.

"When you look at men's basketball, 99 percent of the jobs go to men, why shouldn't 100 or 99 percent of the jobs in women's basketball go to women?" she wondered. "Maybe it's because we only have 10 percent women athletic directors in Division I. People hire people who look like them. That's the problem."

She went on to say that maybe all the girls who play sports in America now should have more role models to look up to when it comes to leadership. There aren't enough of them, she said. When does that change, she asked, and those role models become the norm and not the exception?

Lots of people listened to what she had to say that day (including the Blob), no matter what the asshat in Storrs thinks. And they listened because people do sometimes actually listen to truth-tellers, and that was some absolute stone truth she was laying down.

For Geno Auriemma to belittle all that because Muffet McGraw was wrong about the whole ESPN-UConn thing was classic Geno. Which is to say, classically boorish. 

I would say it was beneath him. But past performance proves it wasn't.