Geno Auriemma's latest meltdown involving South Carolina's Dawn Staley comes with a warning sign for his legacy

Woody Hayes was 64 years old when he punched Clemson’s Charlie Bauman in the throat after an interception in the 1978 Gator Bowl, a moment of college sports infamy that has stood the test of time as the pinnacle of embarrassing behavior by a legendary coach.

As 72-year-old Geno Auriemma charged into his Final Four postgame handshake with Dawn Staley on Friday night, hopped up on grievance and delusion, we should all be thankful his staff had the wherewithal to hold him back from an even uglier escalation.

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How close were we to a Hayes-esque moment that would have ruined the legacy of a 12-time national championship coach? It’s a blessing for women’s basketball and college sports in general that we will never know the answer.

But what happened in the wake of UConn’s 62-48 loss to South Carolina, ending their perfect season, needs to be a wake-up call to everyone who cares about Auriemma and a UConn administration that has become far too tolerant of boorish sideline behavior with both of its basketball coaches.

If this is what it’s going to look like as Auriemma ages into his mid-70s — embittered, petty and aggressive toward a rival coach, not to mention one of the most respected women in sports — it is not a spiral that should be playing out in public.

Hopefully Auriemma has enough people who care in his orbit to tell him the truth: If what happened Friday night is where he’s at in the latter stages of his career, if that’s how he’s going to handle losing after 1,288 wins, it is time to think seriously about ceding the stage.

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That can’t happen again. And yet, as Auriemma did rounds of interviews after the incident, his defiance, petulance and inability to own up a truly disgraceful moment, is worrisome.

Will anyone at UConn be willing and able to sit Auriemma down and make that clear? Or will they just stand by and wait for the next Final Four game that goes sideways, cross their fingers and hope their legendary basketball coach doesn’t trip a wire that makes them wish they had acted sooner the way so many around Hayes eventually admitted?

We don’t know, and shouldn’t speculate, about the psychology of a man who has dominated this sport for the last two decades seeing his unbeaten team struggle so badly against a program and a coach who is poised to dominate it for the next two.

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We only know what we see, and Auriemma did most of the work for us in his unhinged sideline interview with ESPN at the beginning of the fourth quarter. Swearing, whining about the officials, taking a direct shot at Staley for working the officials — something he’d never do, right? It’s an emotional game, but in that moment, Auriemma seemed beyond emotion.

And as it carried over to the handshake line, then the press conference, it became clear that Staley simply got in his head. You can explain it any way you want, and Auriemma certainly tried with some low-grade manure about pregame handshake decorum, but the bottom line is that he has a problem with her.

“We don’t have a lot in common,” Auriemma told reporters when asked if they had any relationship, continuing on to say that he respected the job Staley has done at South Carolina while making it clear they are not on friendly terms.

Now, why does he have such an issue with Staley? We can only look back to the frosty relationship he had with Pat Summitt when she was his foil at Tennessee. In that case, Summitt gave as much as she got, accusing UConn of dirty recruiting tactics and ending their annual series. But in his 2009 book, Auriemma wrote of Summitt: “Pat gets preferential treatment from everybody, that she’s untouchable, because she’s Pat.”

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You can hear echoes of that same mentality in the way he talked about Staley on Friday night, a 72-year-old man trying to coach a game while his mind is fixated on the belief she gets away with things he can’t.

It’s bizarre, unbecoming and should be a moment of deep reflection for both Auriemma and the school that will be marred if the next episode goes worse than this one.

Nobody is saying Auriemma should be happy to pass the baton. His grievances and stubbornness have been part of what makes  him great.

But the truth is that Staley has more than earned whatever he believes she’s taking from him. She could win her fourth national title in nine years on Sunday, and the fact she could make South Carolina into a legitimate rival for UConn has been great for the women’s game.

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And this is what happens in a true rivalry: Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.

For him to be so ungracious about that, to fixate on when she did or didn’t come over to shake his hand, to not recognize that he was in the wrong and make himself the story of the Final Four, it’s all so unfortunate.

For a coach who has won enough to be secure about his place in the game, it should be troubling to those who care about him that in the heat of the moment Friday night, he didn’t recognize how close he came to throwing it all away.