Bob Huggins Wins No. 900 As Mountaineers Beat Morehead State
West Virginia head coach Bob Huggins won his 900th career game on Friday, as the Mountaineers defeated Morehead State, 84-67, in the first round of the 2021 NCAA Tournament.
With the victory, Huggins became the sixth coach in NCAA Division I history to win at least 900 games, joining Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim, Jim Calhoun, Bob Knight and North Carolina’s Roy Williams in that rare club of Division I coaches.
While Huggins was left off the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame finalists for the fourth time last month, the other 900-club coaches are already in the Hall.
Miles McBride led the Mountaineers with 30 points.
Some might use longevity as an excuse to dismiss certain things about certain players and coaches. For Huggins, critics could use the fact that he’s never won a national championship, and has only been to two Final Fours as a head coach (once with Cincinnati and once with West Virginia), as if it’s easy for elite coaches to reach the Final Four. And, certainly, it’s true that the five aforementioned coaches in the 900-club have national titles. Huggins could still win one. The Mountaineers looks built to make trouble in this NCAA Tournament, where they’re a No. 3 seed.
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But, regardless of whether a national championship or the Basketball Hall of Fame comes calling, Huggins is a coach that has done nothing but build and rebuild programs his entire life.
His career started at Walsh College in North Canton, Ohio, now a Division III school. Huggins arrived in 1980 after two years as a graduate assistant at West Virginia and two years as a full-fledged assistant at Ohio State. In three seasons he took Walsh from an under.-500 program to one that won 34 games and won an NAIA district title.
Akron took notice and hired him. Five years later the Zips had four 20-win seasons and an NCAA Tournament berth. Cincinnati was smart to snatch him up.
Huggins made his national reputation with the Bearcats. And at one time the Bearcats were the class of college basketball, winning back-to-back national titles in 1961-62 (beating Ohio State both times) and reaching the NCAA final in 1963.
But that’s not what Huggins inherited. The program he inherited was a shell of that, one that had just four NCAA Tournament appearances and two NIT appearances between 1964 and 1989, the year Huggins took over.
His impact was immediate. The Bearcats made two straight NIT appearances in his first two seasons, following by that magical run to the Final Four in 1992, which ended with a semifinal loss to the Fab Five from Michigan.
The Bearcats never again missed the NCAA Tournament under Huggins. That 1999-2000 team, the one that won 29 game and rode undefeated through Conference USA play, may have been his best team. It may have led him back to the Final Four, if not for the broken leg of Kenyon Martin. His departure after the 2004-05 season was acrimonious, as he accepted a buyout of the final two years of his contract from school officials after he was arrested for a DIU, for which he pleaded no contest, in 2004.
Cincinnati has remained good since Huggins’ departure, but it has reached the Sweet 16 just once since then.
The Kansas State job was a good fit. Huggins spent a year in Manhattan and led the Wildcats to the NIT. But it was impossible to resist the allure of returning home to Morgantown, West Virginia. He was born there. He played at West Virginia. He graduated magna cum laude with a double major at WVU and earned a master’s degree at WVU. If there was ever a coach pre-ordained to take over his alma mater, it was Huggins. It only happened because the Michigan Wolverines, the same program that ousted his Cincinnati Bearcats in 1992, stole John Beilein away.
Huggins has been back in Morgantown for 14 seasons now. That sounds almost impossible. His tenure in his hometown is nearly as long as his tenure at Cincinnati (16 seasons). He took the Mountaineers back to the Final Four in 2010 and has taken the program to four other Sweet 16 appearances. This year’s team has the goods to be special. Plus, Huggins doesn’t have to go anywhere. His contract runs through the 2026-27 season. This is his retirement job, and no one at WVU wants to push him out the door anytime soon.
Huggins’ career is special. And every win from here means another chance to add to a resume that should leave him as one of the game’s most important coaches.
You can find Matthew Postins on Twitter @PostinsPostcard.
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