Report: Dan Hurley consulted Billy Donovan on how to win back-to-back national titles

If you want advice on how to win back-to-back national titles in college hoops, current Chicago Bulls head coach Billy Donovan is the man to speak to.

Donovan was the last man to achieve consecutive national championships at the college level when he led the Florida Gators to the promised land in both 2006 and 2007. According to college basketball insider Jon Rothstein, current reigning title-winner and UConn head coach Dan Hurley has started dialogue with Donovan asking how he was able to pull off such a feat.

As part of an injury report on sophomore center Donovan Clingan — that he’s trending towards being back for the first game — Rothstein revealed that Hurley told him about reaching out to Billy Donovan.

“Dan Hurley tells me that he’s talked with Billy Donovan during the offseason regarding what it takes to win back-to-back national titles,” Rothstein tweeted.

Donovan won the two titles in the mid-2000s as part of a 20-year stint as head coach of Florida, which featured various other immensely-successful seasons, including 2014, when his team went undefeated in SEC play and earned the No. 1 overall seed.

Since leaving the Gators after the 2015 season, Donovan’s largely been a successful NBA coach. He started with Oklahoma City and coached them for five years, culminating in the overachieving 2020 season that saw Shai Gilgeous-Alexander, Chris Paul and Al Horford (also a member of those Florida championship teams) join the team and earn a playoff spot.

Following their first round exit in the bubble in a seven-game series vs. Houston, Oklahoma City pivoted their future to tank, trading Paul and their other veteran pieces for more picks in addition to what they got from trading Russell Westbrook and Paul George the previous summer. So Donovan moved on and landed in Chicago with the Bulls.

In three seasons with Chicago, the Bulls have been an average Eastern Conference team and had an overachieving 2022 season that saw them finish sixth in the conference, largely due to the re-emergence of DeMar DeRozan into one of the NBA’s top scorers despite his age at 32 years old.

The Bulls didn’t meet those standards last year with a 10th place finish and an exit out of the Play-In round via a narrow loss to Miami, who actually went on to win the entire conference when they could have been knocked out of the postseason entirely had Chicago beat them in that one game.