Bob Huggins Staying at West Virginia
West Virginia basketball coach Bob Huggins is expected to remain with the team using an anti-gay slur on a Cincinnati radio show earlier this week, according to a report from ESPN.
While the university has yet to finalize the details and announce a decision. ESPN’s Pete Thamel says that Huggins has agreed to a $1 million salary reduction, a significant suspension, and required sensitivity training.
Huggins, 69, is expected to sign an amended contract with the new details on Wednesday, according to Thamel. With the million-dollar salary reduction, Huggins will go from making $4.2 million to $3.2 million, making it one of the biggest salary reductions in college athletics.
This comes after Huggins got himself in hot water after using a homophobic slur not once, but twice, during an appearance on a Cincinnati radio show on Monday morning.
During a Monday morning segment of 700 WLW’s Bill Cunningham Show, Huggins directed the slur towards Xavier University fans.
At the 1:15 mark of the audio clip, which was posted by Awful Announcing on Twitter, you can hear Huggins mention “all those f**s, those Catholic f**s,” when referencing Xavier fans who would “throw rubber penises on the floor, and then say they didn’t do it.”
Huggins remarks were in response to a question of if he’d “poached any Xavier guys to come play at West Virginia” to which he said, “Catholics don’t do that.”
West Virginia put out a statement on Monday afternoon reading, “Coach Huggins’ remarks today on a Cincinnati radio show were insensitive, offensive and do not represent our university values. West Virginia University does not condone the use of such language and takes such actions very seriously. The situation is under review and will be addressed by the university and its athletic department.”
Huggins is a West Virginia graduate who also coached at Akron before being hired at Cincinnati then coached at Kansas State before joining the Mountaineers. Huggins was recently inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame with an overall record of 934-415 as a head coach, dating back to his first job at Walsh College in Ohio in the early 1980s.
