Auriemma says critics were ‘lying in weeds waiting’ in runup to Staley confrontation at Final Four | College basketball
Six weeks after his team’s loss to South Carolina in the Final Four, UConn coach Geno Auriemma said Monday he felt “stupid” about how his postgame exchange with Gamecocks coach Dawn Staley played out in front of a national audience.
“When I then walked into the locker room with the coaches, you were just shaking your head thinking five more seconds, you couldn’t keep that in five more seconds,” Auriemma said in his first news conference since then.
“You just feel stupid because of the way it played out. We’re all human and we all do stupid shit.”
Auriemma ignited a firestorm of criticism after approaching Staley in the final seconds of South Carolina’s 62-48 win in Phoenix and yelling at him.
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The coaches of both teams had to separate the two. When the game finally ended, Auriemma walked off the field to the locker room without shaking hands with anyone from South Carolina.
Auriemma said the exchange was about the lack of a traditional pregame handshake between the coaches. He later apologized in a written statement.
“I haven’t seen a lot of it, but that’s normal,” Auriemma said of the negative reaction. “I think maybe part of it was justified and part of it was because people were waiting for that moment in the weeds. Whatever you did for the game, that’s what you just did.
“Unfortunately, that’s the world we live in today and it’s generally one-sided. People who have understood what it was about in a different light, they’re not going to go on the air and say it. They’re not going to write about it because now they’re going against a big Internet or media frenzy; they’re not going to do it. I’m the one who started the criticism. I didn’t bring the [stuff] it came after that on myself.
Auriemma likened the reaction to what might have happened if social media had existed in 1998, when he asked an injured Nykesha Sales to make a basket so she could set the program’s career record.
“Immediately, it was the worst thing that ever happened to basketball and sports in general,” Auriemma said. “These things that happen, you all take them with a grain of salt, understand them. I did what I did, I apologized and I moved on.”
