The UConn men’s basketball’s season-opening 40-point rout over Gardner-Webb featured plenty of storylines.
Braylon Mullins shot 7-for-12 from the field, burying four three-pointers, to notch his fourth career 20-point game. In his regular-season Husky debut, Seton Hall transfer Na’jai Hines posted a 12-point, 12-rebound double-double. Yet what might become most noteworthy was the two-time All-Big East selection dressed in a white polo and khakis who stood on the sideline watching it all take place.
The story is enticing. Coming off a junior campaign where he was a Jerry West Shooting Guard of the Year Award finalist, Solo Ball was willing to sit out a year to save his last season of eligibility for when he is fully healthy. He planned on waiting for his turn to be the 1A player and given the keys to the team, where every Dan Hurley offensive set would revolve around him. If he sacrificed one season to fully heal, he could return as the face of UConn basketball, the program’s posterchild. A storybook senior season.
That was the plan UConn senior guard Solo Ball agreed to in April, when the team announced that he would take a medical redshirt for the 2026-27 season to undergo scheduled wrist surgery.
The plans have since changed. Ball’s wrist is no longer in a brace, and recent reports have indicated he’s back practicing with the team. Hurley has since shifted to saying that Ball could potentially come back later this year.
This is all due to changes in the sport that came in June. The NCAA Division I cabinet officially approved the “5-in-5″ age-based eligibility rule over the summer. The rule is as straightforward as can be. NCAA athletes can now play up to five years of competition within a five-year period. “The clock starts either upon full-time college enrollment or the academic year after the athlete turns 19, whichever happens first,” according to the NCAA website.
This was a much-needed ruling in college sports. Graduate students have always existed; it will just work towards eliminating the extremity of the player who is somehow in his eighth NCAA season at 26 with a wife and kids watching from the stands.
The ruling’s biggest impact, however, will be leading to the extinction of redshirting.
In the case of Ball, his plan was to sit out the season to get an extra year on the backend, but now he’s getting a bonus season anyway. It would be in Ball’s best interest to play this season to take advantage of that extra year. If he were to sit out the whole year, he would return with just one season left to play instead of two.
Moving forward, the trend in the sport will likely see coaches move away from redshirting players to save eligibility because they are granted an additional year anyway.
After an opening night where UConn shot 9-for-29 from 3, a man who led the Big East with a .414 3-point percentage his sophomore year prior to injuring his shooting wrist, which is now presumably healed, is tantalizing.
More than anything, Hurley’s squad could benefit from another veteran in the rotation. His 2024 national championship team was led by two senior guards in Cam Spencer and Tristen Newton, while six out of the nine rotation players in 2023 were upperclassmen. Last year’s team, which fell in the title game, had a rotation that featured seven upperclassmen and were led by seniors Alex Karaban and Tarris Reed Jr. down the stretch. This year, seven players of the early ten-man rotation are underclassmen, contrary to how Hurley has won with experience in the past.
The last program that won a National Championship with a rotation built on primarily underclassmen was 2015 Duke, a team that was led by three freshman starters. Since then, Villanova, North Carolina, Virginia, Baylor, Kansas, Florida and Michigan have all cut down the nets with experienced rosters, typically led by veteran guard play.
Not to mention, Ball has more experience than anyone else on the roster in the UConn offensive system. After losing Karaban and assistant coach Luke Murray, Ball could step up as another coach on the floor and fill the role of Karaban as the brains of the offense, especially when the mastermind that is credited for designing the offense is now coaching Boston College.
The point being, this year’s roster is young, and recent history indicates UConn would benefit from adding a veteran guard, especially one that knows the system better than anyone still with the program. If you can get that player off the sideline and into a uniform, you do that in a heartbeat.
The caveat is that wrist injuries don’t take a year to come back from. Hurley and his staff were strategic with the initial plan of the medical redshirt. It was in the team’s best interest back in April for Ball to sit out the year because he would fit much better with the 2027-28 team without Mullins — who will presumably leave for the NBA Draft — than this year’s group. Now, him and the coaching staff will have to find where he fits in on this year’s team that was built with the impression of him not being available.
Simply put, there is a redundancy in the skillsets of Mullins and Ball. Last season, they were both sharpshooters with defensive limitations, and when they were both out there at the same time, it created an undersized lineup where UConn could be taken advantage of defensively.
Additionally, having to run sets for two competing shooting guards where one was trying to get to their left hand and the other their right, disrupted the offensive flow, compared to what it looked like in 2023 and 2024, when every set could be run to get attacks going to everyone’s dominant right hand. This suggests that, at times, Mullins and Ball struggled to share the floor together.
The best five-man group from last year’s team was Mullins with Silas Demary Jr., Jaylin Stewart, Karaban and Reed, according to EvanMiya.com. This lineup best reflects Hurley’s championship teams of the past and how he presumably used this archetype to build this year’s roster.
Hurley’s team-building formula has been laid out over the last half decade: a heavy-usage point guard like Newton and Demary; a shooting guard that can run off pin-downs and flares relentlessly all game to hunt open looks like Hawkins, Spencer and now Mullins; an elite perimeter defender at the three that is a high-level athlete and can handle the ball in Andre Jackson Jr., Stephon Castle and now Jayden Ross; Alex Karaban at the four (Nik Khamenia is now the successor) and a bruising center in the post that will wear the defense down over the course of the game and force the opponent into difficult decisions on doubling the post to leave shooters open in Adama Sanogo, Donovan Clingan, Reed and now Hines.
This has been the mold that has seen success in the Hurley tenure, and Mullins already fills the spot that Ball’s role would be.
Not just that, but the main issue of Mullins and Ball sharing the floor has been how undersized it makes UConn defensively — especially in a day and age in college basketball when programs have to play through the trees in the biggest games to win.
For example, Michigan played three bigs last year. Mullins and Ball out there to start in the National Championship game forced 6-foot-4 Ball into a mismatch when he had to guard 6-foot-9 Yaxel Lendeborg.
The No. 1 team in the country this year, Florida, also play three bigs in the starting lineup. With Ross and Khamenia on the wing instead of Ball, UConn would have much more reasonable matchups that would not give Florida a clear advantage if they were to potentially meet.
Hurley has already said on record that he believes this is his best defensive team. As a matter of fact, in the game where both Mullins and Ball did not play against Syracuse in a preseason exhibition, Syracuse guards shot 5-for-29 in the game. This was in large part due to UConn’s size with Colben Landrew, Ross and Khamenia defending guards and being able to completely shut the water off.
Now, with all this being said, Ball’s availability makes this team better. In the event of Mullins being in foul trouble or dealing with injury, Ball would be a seamless fit into the rotation. There’s just a log jam at the position with players of similar skillsets.
Promises were likely already made to UConn’s current starting five, which means if Ball were to return, he would likely see time coming off the bench. Having too much depth is never a bad issue to have, and is one Hurley and his staff could experience very soon.