A week in the University of Cincinnati's basketball life stopped short of a month, a year or a decade with Bob Huggins' decision Monday afternoon to stay put. However one feels about Huggins -- and the city certainly came down in his favor -- UC basketball dodged a passionate bullet, the call of Huggins' birthplace and alma mater.
Some of the conjecture preceding Huggins' flirtation with West Virginia University is unchanged. If, for example, Huggins really is irked that Rick Pitino and John Calipari make more money, that's still on the table and the NBA still is in business. The university issued nothing to indicate that Huggins parlayed his mixed feelings into a pay raise, nor was evidence forthcoming to the effect that UC will unfurl more resources for the basketball program.
Evidence was scant during a week when sports fans in Cincinnati and West Virginia breathlessly sought reports from journalists who tried their best to be accommodating in the absence of new facts. It was as if every unnamed source contradicted the last, which is to be expected when the story is a fellow going back and forth with an important decision in his life. Knock unnamed sources if you want; without them, there was little to report last week.
Outside Huggins' TV interview with Dennis Jansen and the official versions of the athletic departments, the one source close to Huggins who talked was his father, high school coaching legend Charlie Huggins. The elder Huggins told the West Virginia Dominion-Post that his son could knock 'em dead at WVU but his family is attached to Cincinnati and he'd probably want to be sure about the program having "the things that would make it possible for him" to go all the way.
At various times last week, the UC athletic department pronounced it would match West Virginia's offer. And here's where the story gets interesting. If West Virginia put together a financial package better than Huggins' deal at UC, it was only marginally better and, by some accounts, wasn't even as good.
Evidently, West Virginia talked with Huggins or his representatives about facilities improvements, including the home arena. But it sounded as if the improvements were negotiable, when accounts suggest the university should be doing them anyway. Alongside their stated desire to fetch Huggins, nothing coming from West Virginia officials indicated a burning desire to step up and make a commitment to big-time college basketball.
WVU and many of its fans seemed to think the right basketball coach would make all the difference. But even the great coaches don't believe that. They need the tools -- a good office space, money for assistants, a nice arena, private planes for quick recruiting visits. That's the name of the game. It's a bit excessive, but that's what the market will bear.
Maybe WVU gave Huggins a different impression, but the discourse about his courtship coming from West Virginia smacked more of wispy nostalgia than desk-pounding passion with real money behind it. West Virginians, it would seem, thought they could get it done by calling Huggins home.
And if that's how West Virginia wants to approach it, then hooray for West Virginia. We're talking about a public university in a state with much deeper problems than the success of its basketball program. The university has to make tough decisions about what it can afford and what its market can support relative to the big markets in the Big East. West Virginia wanted Huggins, but within its limits.
It says a bit about West Virginia's pull on Huggins that he fought this decision despite the money and the shambles of the program. Indeed, were it not for that emotional pull, West Virginia might have no business talking to him.
It would be a bit like a possible future scenario for UC football. Suppose an alumnus of Rick Minter's program were to strike it big as a major college football coach, then be "called home" by UC. Even if the tiny stadium were meaningful for our fictional alum, we'd expect him to consider the general condition of the facilities, the university's commitment, fan support and the possibility of competing on the national stage, and then decline the offer.
Important differences abound, of course. Reports from West Virginia tell of fans who couldn't have been more thrilled with the possibility of bringing Huggins back. At the same time, some kind of took for granted that he would return, that it would be the way life is supposed to happen. And the WVU Coliseum, touted as the biggest on-campus arena in the Big East, might be pretty nice. But how does it compare with the lavish professional arenas in major eastern cities where smaller universities in the league play home games?
Morgantown, W.Va., might be Huggins' birthplace and alma mater, the store of many fond memories and home to his favorite people. But Huggins is an adult now, 48 years old, playing major college basketball for high stakes. At UC, he's built a program not entirely from scratch. He started in a brand-new, on-campus arena and the locals, whether aching for a return to previous UC basketball glory or just starved for a decent winter sports team, talked about Oscar Robertson and Tony Yates as if they'd just gotten out of school.
With that, and his work, Huggins turned out an operation that reliably produces 25 wins and an NCAA Tournament berth. If West Virginia doesn't want to play that game on its own -- or just can't -- then Huggins doesn't fit there. Often, people can't go home again simply because they outgrow it.
Because money apparently made little difference either way, Huggins faced a purely emotional decision and chose the life he's made over the life into which he was born. In retrospect, it's a small wonder -- the life he's made is better.
Huggins today is the top sports hero in a bigger pond, loved by thousands, admired by many thousands more, and even people who don't particularly care for him concede that he's a damn good basketball coach. He had no reason to leave.
As cities of its size go, Cincinnati is congenial to a very narrow range of possible human experience. Some people want to leave Cincinnati for those very reasons, and it is highly recommended that they do. But Bob Huggins isn't one of those people.
Even if Huggins weren't a good basketball coach, he could fit with Cincinnati in some other way. That's part of his local appeal. He doesn't need or want an environment in which he can re-invent himself or test the limits of the moral imagination. He needs a place where he can play basketball for the national championship, and he has it.
We already knew Huggins didn't want to leave Cincinnati. He could have escaped to the NBA's Los Angeles Clippers last year for $8 million. We also knew that Huggins would like to return to West Virginia, but West Virginia didn't make him want to go back. WVU couldn't give Huggins enough reasons to coach there, beyond those he already had.
For those concerned about Huggins' long-term future at UC, the possibility that he would bolt for another college job is as good as gone. By no reckoning would Huggins have left UC for any college job except West Virginia. But he has mentioned a certain intrigue with the NBA and, a time or two, has even been quoted to the effect that he might just want to hang it up in a few years.
And if you're more concerned about UC than Huggins, the good news is that UC doesn't have to go into a coaching search. In a year when the pickings are kind of slim, UC would be competing with Arkansas, Washington, New Mexico and DePaul for its next coach. Is UC a better job than those? The market would tell us. Also, it's not ridiculous to wonder how Cincinnati's racial atmosphere would play into a coaching search.
UC would have gone on without Huggins, but it probably wouldn't have been any better. It's fine to point out that Tubby Smith won the national championship at Kentucky the year after Pitino left or that Mike Davis has Indiana in the Final Four two years after Bob Knight or that Thad Matta was 26-6 at Xavier one year after Skip Prosser. But the time to measure a college basketball coach is five years into the job, after his own recruits populate the team and his own program is firmly in place.
It's easy to overstate the greatness and value of athletic coaches. Winning basketball games doesn't make any great difference, since it's built into sports that somebody is going to win the game and the outcome doesn't truly matter.
Still, it's fun and glamorous for everyday fans who need their compensatory heroes. Cincinnati doesn't have a lot of those right now. But it has Huggins, whose most heroic act for a troubled city after 332 wins here might have been the decision to stick around.
