The Mountaineer basketball program and its legendary coach, Bob Huggins, are at a crossroads.
The just-ended season was disappointing. The Mountaineers finished 16-17 overall and tallied just 4 wins in 18 Big 12 conference games, which relegated the team to last place for the second time in the last four years.
The Mountaineers fortunes have been falling in the league. In its ten years as a member, West Virginia has won the fourth most conference games. However, in the last four seasons, that number has fallen to the seventh most wins.
The current team has been decimated by departures, six to graduation at the end of this season and now two promising players for next year—Jalen Bridges and Isaiah Cottrell—have entered the transfer portal. Ninety-two percent of the points off this year’s team are gone.
Mountaineer Nation had to suffer the indignities this season of watching their team flail away while being constantly reminded of the remarkable accomplishments of Oscar Tshiebwe, the star recruit of Huggins tenure, who left West Virginia for Kentucky.
Huggins’ achievements are historic. He has won 916 career games over 40 seasons, including 326 at West Virginia over 15 seasons. Huggins is 3rd among active Division-1 coaches in wins, behind the retiring Mike Krzyzewski and Jim Boeheim.
Huggins’ West Virginia teams have been to the NCAA Tournament ten times in his 15 seasons in Morgantown. The 2010 team went to the Final Four. He is on the brink of being inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame.
You do not get as far as Huggins without being an excellent coach. What possible game scenario could develop that he has not coached his way through hundreds of times? But now his greatest challenge is what is happening off the court.
The game has changed radically in just a few months. The transfer portal has unleashed unprecedented player movement from one school to another. So far, the most successful coaches in this still-evolving system are managing to hold on to their best players while snagging multiple transfers.
Name, image and likeness means college athletes can now be paid. The most lucrative financial deal for an athlete is now part of the recruiting and transfer calculus.
Huggins has gone on record multiple times complaining about the changes. He does not like them, and believes they are bad for the game. That is understandable. It is unsettling to learn that the system under which you have worked all your adult life and been successful is suddenly out of date.
But there is no going back now.
The artist Mary Engelbreit said, “If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.” And that’s the course Huggins must find himself on now. He is a proud man who hates losing, and that should provide plenty of motivation to use all his accumulated skill and many contacts to field a competitive team next season.
The Morgantown native, former player for the Mountaineers and WVU graduate, is a loyal Mountaineer. Huggins’ annual Fish Fry charity event on behalf of his late mother, Norma Mae Huggins, has raised over $16 million for the WVU Cancer Institute.
He has many times over earned the respect and admiration of Mountaineer Nation. Huggins has built a significant reservoir of good will. He has more than earned the opportunity to fix what is broken, not only the success of the Mountaineer basketball program, but also his legacy.
The crossroads await.