Geno is happy that Tennessee rivalry has faded: 'It just became stupid'

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Why Geno is happy that rivalry with Tennessee has faded

UConn-Tennessee, the rivalry that defined women’s basketball for close to a decade in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, is more like an exercise in nostalgia these days.

Since the series was renewed in 2020, the Huskies have won all four games and three of those weren’t particularly close. Instead of being a battle being the nation’s two top teams, UConn remains a perennial title contender while the Vols are 18th and re-starting a rebuild that’s lasted more than a decade. It’s no longer The Game on either side’s schedule.

Even the rancor that defined the latter years of that first era and eventually led to the cancelation of the series (then continued early in the renewal with the Evina Westbrook saga) has largely faded.

Geno Auriemma is glad the the days of acrimony — to which he contributed plenty — are over.

“I'm happy that it's not what it was at one time. It just became stupid and became something I didn’t want to be a part of anymore,” he said. “It just became something other than the basketball game. After a while, that just got old.”

For the first five years of the budding rivalry, it was all about basketball. In their first meeting on MLK Day in 1995, they were the top two teams in the country and the Associated Press delayed the release of its weekly top 25 poll until after the contest. Three months later, UConn beat Tennessee to win its first national title.

The next season, they again met in the Final Four but the Vols got their first win in the series. One year later, Tennessee again ended UConn’s season, this time in the Elite Eight. Tensions flared in 1999 after Svetlana Abrosimova got into a scrap with Semeka Randall but the animosity stayed on the court.

When Summitt went on a book tour that included Hartford, Auriemma sent a bouquet of flowers with a playful message: “Congratulations, I hope your next visit is not nearly so successful.”

Then came the 2000 Final Four in Auriemma’s hometown of Philadelphia. That’s when the rivalry spilled off the court and began to evolve from UConn-Tennessee to Geno vs. Pat.

During that weekend, Auriemma was asked about the city’s two most famous cheeseteak restaurants: “Geno’s” and “Pat’s”, located across the street from each other. He took it as a chance to needle his counterpart.

“Pat's is older and more dilapidated. Geno's is bigger and brand-new,” Auriemma joked.

Summitt — along with the Vols’ players and fanbase — didn’t find it very funny but remained cordial. The Tennessee coach “tried to be correct and decorous in public,” she later wrote in her book, “Sum It Up.” “I was intensely competitive but left it on the court.”

Still, the smoldering began.

The next summer, Summitt accused Auriemma of shouting her name at a restaurant, which prompted her to leave. In 2003, Summitt befriended Villanova coach Harry Perretta and hosted his team for a cookout at her home before they faced off in the NCAA Tournament. Auriemma, a longtime friend of Perretta, feigned betrayal.

“He dumped me for the Evil Empire,” Auriemma quipped, referencing the Boston Red Sox’s nickname for the New York Yankees, its own arch-rival. Summitt didn’t take kindly to the reference and wrote in her book that Auriemma was “jealous”.

At the 2004 Final Four, Summitt was asked what she’d do if she came upon Auriemma broken down on the side of the road: “Well I’d stop and ask if I can help him,” she answered magnanimously. When Auriemma was given a similar prompt, he also stayed true to his personality: [Laughs] “I’d walk.”

At that point, Summitt publicly acknowledged their strained relationship.

“I don’t have his number. We don’t talk. We speak before and after the games. That’s it,” she said. “But that’s the relationship that Geno worked very hard to create.”

That message got through to Auriemma. Despite the fireworks in the previous days, he attempted to bridge the gap with Summitt after UConn beat Tennessee in the 2004 national championship.

“‘Don’t listen to all this crap you hear and read. Sometimes I just say things for fun. It’s not meant to be at your expense. I have tremendous respect for what you’ve done, and how you do it, and that will always be true,’” he wrote in his book — “Geno: In Pursuit of Perfection.”

That dropped the temperature for awhile.

Then came Maya Moore. The top-ranked recruit in the class of 2007 and a native of Atlanta — just 3.5 hours from Knoxville — Moore spurned Tennessee and picked the Huskies instead. While this was far from the only recruiting battle that either side lost, Summitt accused Auriemma of improper tactics — cheating. She made a formal complaint to the NCAA through the SEC but aside from UConn self-reporting a secondary violation for setting up a tour of ESPN studios for Moore, the NCAA never found any wrongdoing.

Despite that, Summitt decided to end the series with UConn in 2007. She never publicly explained her reasoning, though she wrote in her book that when Auriemma called to see if they could rectify the situation and continue playing, Summitt again insinuated that he cheated.

Publicly, Summitt remained vague.

“I’m not going to tell you the reasons… If he wants to tell it, he can tell it,” she said.

Auriemma fired back.

“She hates my guts,” he said.

"She accused us of cheating," he mentioned later. "She just doesn't have the courage to say it publicly."

Auriemma and Summitt never faced off on the court again. Without the annual matchup in the regular season, the stars never aligned to pit the teams against each other in the NCAA Tournament.

In 2012, Summitt retired after being diagnosed with early-onset dementia, Alzheimer’s type, the previous year. At the Final Four in Denver, the two coaches finally reconciled and Auriemma became the first donor to the Pat Summitt Foundation.

Summitt died in 2016 and in the years since, Auriemma has made it clear that he still feels her absence.

“I miss having here there. I miss looking forward to having her there,” a solemn Auriemma said after the first game of the renewal in 2020. ”I didn’t miss having to coach against her. But I miss looking forward to it.”

That didn’t end the bad blood between Auriemma and Tennessee, though. In 2019, Evina Westbrook transferred from the Vols to the Huskies and UConn sought a waiver that would’ve allowed her to play immediately instead of sitting out a year.

The NCAA denied it, which led to Auriemma accusing Tennessee of failing to support the waiver despite fostering an environment that wasn’t healthy.

“If one of my players went through what Evina went through, there’d be an investigation. It wasn’t normal,” he fumed.

Yet in the five years since, Auriemma has even buried the hatchet with Tennessee. On Tuesday, he went so far as to compliment athletic director Danny White for making “great” coaching hires — Kim Caldwell included.

So despite all the history that unfolded between the teams since that fateful first meeting on MLK Day 30 years ago, Auriemma has started to view this as just another game.

“Whoever's coaching here when I'm not coaching, they're not going to have the same vibe. This is Pat, Holly, Kellie, now Kim — so that's a lot and with each passing one, I think it gets a little more normal,” he said. “Because it became something that wasn't normal. So now it's just a really good game on our schedule.”

Perhaps that’s not a bad thing. UConn-Tennessee became so well-known because it was the rare occasion that the sports world turned its attention to women’s basketball. In the decades since, the sport has exploded in popularity and it’s no longer dominated by two teams.

South Carolina has taken over in recent years. LSU won a national championship. USC has been resurrected by JuJu Watkins. Caitlin Clark made Iowa a phenomenon. Notre Dame remains among the elite. The Huskies are still there, too.

UConn-Tennessee no longer carries the same weight — and that’s okay.

“I think things evolved and the game grew,” Auriemma said. “There's more really, really good teams and there's a lot of attention now in the game. It's not just a lot of attention on two particular programs. It's spread nationwide.

“So, yeah, it's not what it used to be.”

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