Bob Huggins

Robert Edward Huggins (born September 21, 1953), nicknamed "Huggy Bear", is an American college basketball coach.

He was the head coach at Walsh, Akron, Cincinnati, Kansas State, and West Virginia.

He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2022.

Huggins is the sixth men's college basketball coach with 900 or more career victories.

He has been to 24 total NCAA tournaments, including 23 in the last 26 seasons.

He was an all-state pick in three years, the Ohio Player of the Year in 1972, and he finished his high school career with 2,438 points, twelfth in Ohio history at the time.

Huggins began college at Ohio University.

After his freshman season he transferred to his native West Virginia.

He played point guard for the Mountaineers from 1975 until 1977 under head coach Joedy Gardner.

His career-high was 28 points against Virginia Tech.

He averaged 13.2 points as a senior and totaled 800 career points in his three collegiate seasons.

He graduated from WVU magna cum laude with a double major in education and physical education and subsequently received a master's degree in health administration from WVU.

Huggins began his coaching career as a graduate assistant at West Virginia under Gardner in 1977.

He then spent two years as an assistant to Eldon Miller at Ohio State University.

When Huggins was hired, the Bearcats had not earned a bid to the NCAA tournament since 1977.

Huggins was 27 when he became a collegiate head coach for the first time, at Walsh University in 1980.

In three seasons at Walsh, he compiled a 71–26 record, twice earning NAIA District 22 Coach of the Year honors.

Huggins directed the Walsh 1982–83 team to a perfect 30–0 regular season mark and an eventual 34–1 mark.

After serving as an assistant at University of Central Florida for the 1983–84 season, Huggins was named head coach of the University of Akron.

Huggins compiled a 97–46 record and reached post-season play in three of his five seasons at Akron, including an NCAA bid in 1985–86 season.

Huggins was the head coach of the Cincinnati Bearcats from 1989 to 2005.

He has led his teams to nine Sweet Sixteen appearances, four Elite Eight appearances (3 at Cincinnati and 1 at West Virginia University), and two Final Four appearances (1992 with Cincinnati and 2010 with West Virginia).

Huggins has also lost in the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament a total of 16 times.

As of March 2021, Huggins has averaged 23 wins per season over the course of his career.

He is also the second coach to win 300 games at two schools.

Huggins released a statement announcing his resignation and retirement from West Virginia in 2023, following his drunk driving arrest.

He later denied having officially resigned in a letter his lawyer sent to the university demanding his reinstatement.

Huggins, who had moved from Morgantown, West Virginia to Port Washington, Ohio, with his family, played basketball for his father, Charles, at Indian Valley South High School.

As a senior, he helped lead his team to a 26–0 season.

The Bearcats were invited to the NIT in his first two years, and then advanced to the Final Four of the 1992 NCAA tournament, Huggins' third season as coach.

This was the first of 13 consecutive seasons in which the Bearcats appeared in the NCAA tournament.

Twenty-seven percent of Huggins's players graduated with a degree, a rate described by one commentator as "abysmal".

During four of his years as Cincinnati's head coach, his graduation rate was 0%; that is, none of his players earned a degree.

In 2021, Huggins told a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter that criticism of his graduation rates was a "terrible rap", noting that his junior college transfers were not treated as graduates even if they later earned a degree.

In addition to their Final Four appearance in 1992, they advanced to the Elite Eight of the NCAA tournament two other times, in 1993 and 1996.

According to the NCAA, the Bearcats men's basketball team's graduation rate increased as soon as Huggins left the head coaching job, although as late as 2017, it continued to be much lower than for other athletic programs at Cincinnati.

Overall, Huggins compiled a 399–127 record (.759) in his 16 years at Cincinnati, making him the winningest basketball coach in the school's history.

Only Ed Jucker has a better win percentage among Bearcats coaches.

Huggins directed Cincinnati to ten conference regular-season titles and eight league tournament titles.

The Bearcats appeared in post-season play in each of Huggins' 16 seasons.