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Full disclosure: I'm a UConn grad and fan.
That being said I sympathized with Cahill on this one. How many times has a coach been sitting right next to you screaming for a timeout only to have you realize it only after the 10th time? Combat pilots call it sensory overload (there are numerous examples of pilots missing a clear bandit call simply because there were too many sensory inputs) and target fixation (flying into the ground because you became fixated on the target to the exclusion of everything else). This was a key moment in the game (aren't they all?) as UConn had come back from a 12 point deficit so perhaps the officials were concentrating more on the court than coaches off it.
The problem becomes worse, in my mind, because a coach expects to be granted a timeout the first/any time they request it (that's not realistic, in my mind). As they continue to request it the frustration/tension mounts to the point where they're ready to bite your head off because you don't hear/recognize them (I look for coaches to call timeouts in certain situations, like after a several breakaway baskets by the opposition, but in others I'll admit to concentrating more on the play like in closely guarded situations - yet another development area). I try to tell players in pre-game that they know their coach's voice a lot better than we do and to request time if we're not hearing their coach for some reason.
To further Jurassic, if the timeout is to be granted upon the whistle and the clock stopped, I'm not sure why they added time back onto the clock. The answer is, I think, that when they granted the timeout the ball was in UConn's possession. They probably backed it up to the last time the ball was in Syracuse's control, but I'm not certain of NCAA rules regarding that kind of fix.
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