Dan Hurley has two national championships. He now also has a scarecrow, and the scarecrow is what went viral this week.
Outside The Charles restaurant in Wethersfield, Connecticut, two friends named Jeff Bottaro and Ryan Lawlor built a two-figure display for Scarecrows Along Main, the town’s 31st annual event. The figures are Hurley and NCAA referee Roger Ayers, foreheads pressed together.
They put it up on Wednesday evening, October 1. By Thursday morning the photos had piled up millions of social impressions and coverage from ESPN, Yahoo Sports and Bleacher Report.
“What’s cool about it is how quickly everyone gravitated toward it,” Bottaro said. “It’s almost like a statue of the moment.”
What actually happened in March
The moment being immortalized in burlap came on March 31, 2026, in the Elite Eight. Duke led UConn 44-29 at halftime. Silas Demary Jr. hit a free throw with ten seconds left, and Braylon Mullins buried a 35-footer to win it.
In the chaos after the shot, Hurley and Ayers ended up forehead to forehead. The clip ran for days. Ayers later described it as a non-event: “Nothing happened. The ball went in. I was running back they were… He said something to me, I said something to him.”
No discipline for Hurley has been reported. Ayers was not assigned to the Final Four, and when that got linked to the Hurley exchange, the NCAA media office said flatly that the incident “had no bearing on the selection of the Final Four officials.”
How a coach becomes folklore
Players get statues. Coaches get banners and buildings, and almost none of them ever get a moment a stranger can rebuild out of styrofoam heads from Michaels and a skin-toned burlap sack stuffed into a navy suit.
Hurley does, because the sideline behavior is the product. He argues with officials and he gets tossed, and Connecticut loves him for that rather than in spite of it. Folklore needs raw material that simple: a gesture you can recognize from twenty feet away without a caption.
It helps that the story does not end in triumph. UConn’s run stopped in the national championship game, a 69-63 loss to Michigan on April 6 that gave the Wolverines their first men’s title since 1989. Michigan got the trophy. Wethersfield got the scarecrow.
That is usually how this works. The moments that stick around are rarely the ones with confetti. Nobody built a diorama of a ribbon cutting, and nobody had to be told who the guy in the navy suit was.
The display will outlive the argument
Ayers has every right to be irritated that six seconds of a 40-minute game has become his most famous appearance. The NCAA says his Final Four assignment had nothing to do with it, and there is no reporting that suggests otherwise.
Still, this is the trade a referee makes. Hurley’s version of the story ends with a lawn ornament in his honor on Main Street. Ayers gets to be the other head. Scarecrows Along Main has been running for three decades, and it has probably never had a week like this one.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.