STORRS, Conn. -- Connecticut coach Jim Calhoun, battling shingles and a cold, took the second half off Saturday night against Rutgers.
His team did not.
Hasheem Thabeet led a balanced Connecticut attack with 15 points and eight rebounds, and the second-ranked Huskies snapped back from their first loss of the season with an 80-49 win over the Scarlet Knights.
UConn held the Scarlet Knights to 29 percent shooting for the game and outscored Rutgers 51-31 after intermission. The Huskies forced 15 Scarlet Knight turnovers, and outrebounded Rutgers 37-29.
"We as a team came out and said, 'We're going to play defense,"' said Thabeet, UConn's 7-foot-3 center. "We got a lot of defensive rebounds and just kept them from making shots."
Jerome Dyson added 14 points and Jeff Adrien had 13 for UConn (12-1, 1-1 Big East). Stanley Robinson, making his first start of the year, chipped in 11 points and seven boards.
It was the third consecutive loss to a highly ranked team for Rutgers (9-6, 0-2), which was beaten last Sunday by No. 1 North Carolina and lost on Wednesday to No. 3 Pittsburgh.
"This was the best defensive team tonight out of the three that we faced," said Rutgers coach Fred Hill.
Gregory Echenique led the Scarlet Knights with 17. Freshman guard Mike Rosario, who had 26 points against the Tar Heels and 22 against Pitt, hit just two of 13 shots from the field and finished with 10 points, playing much of the game with Dyson or Craig Austrie in his face.
"I really thrive on that," said Dyson. "If you play good defense, it's going to always lead to something good on the other side."
The win moved Calhoun into a tie with Lefty Driesell for seventh on the NCAA career wins list with 786.
Calhoun, who has overcome multiple bouts with cancer, has missed all or part of 20 games at UConn. The Huskies are 16-4 in those games.
Associate head coach George Blaney said Calhoun caught the cold during the Huskies' recent trip to Seattle, where they beat Gonzaga last month.
"He hasn't really shaken that yet, on top of the other things that he had," said Blaney, who ran the team in the second half.
The Scarlet Knights jumped out to a 7-2 lead as UConn hit just one of its first eight shots from the field. But the Huskies used a 10-2 run that included two monster dunks from Robinson to get into the game, and closed the half with a 17-7 run to take a 29-18 lead into the break.
UConn held Rutgers to just six first-half field goals.
"Stanley Robinson changes us from a small team to a big team," said Blaney. "Some of the athletic plays he makes are spectacular."
UConn used a 12-2 run midway through the half to push the lead to 53-31, and a tomahawk dunk by Dyson made it 57-38 a couple minutes later.
Adrien moved into 23rd place on the school's career scoring list, and his seven rebounds moved him past Jake Voskuhl into eighth place on the school's all-time list.
UConn, which was beaten 74-63 by No. 11 Georgetown on Monday, has started league play 0-2 just once under Calhoun. The Huskies lost games at St. John's and at home to Villanova in the 1989-90 season, a year UConn made it to the NCAA regional finals.
It was the Huskies' eighth consecutive win over Rutgers, and 16th win in the 17 games the teams have played since the Scarlet Knights joined the conference in 1995.
