Mama said there'd be days like this, UConn. Papa never did. Papa was incredibly more upbeat. Papa was wrong.
According to a report coming from the NBC affiliate in Connecticut, UConn basketball coach Jim Calhoun is going to call it a career before the start of the 2012-13 season. An official announcement could be made as early as tomorrow.
Calhoun, 70, has been the head coach at UConn for 26 seasons and has taken the program from relative obscurity to national powerhouse. Under Calhoun, the Huskies - who had won just four NCAA Tournament games prior to 1990 - claimed national championships in 1999, 2004 and 2011.
Calhoun was inducted into the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame in 2005.
Connecticut isn't eligible for postseason play this season because of poor APR scores, which means what was already going to be an extremely odd season in Storrs is about to get that much stranger.
As bad as this is for UConn, it's also not exactly uplifting news for the Big East as a whole on the day it lost Notre Dame to the ACC. Despite the fact that both have made it pretty clear that they'd rather be elsewhere, I think Louisville and Connecticut were going to kind of be looked at as the program's that needed to carry the flag for the conference on the hardwood beginning in 2013-14. With Calhoun gone, whether or not the Huskies will be able to do that capably would seem to be in extreme jeopardy.
I'll go ahead and say it: Billy Gillispie for UConn.