Stubborn Bearcat
Bob Huggins reportedly is done at Cincinnati, the dormant former national power he revived and took to 14 consecutive NCAA tournaments.
The news comes as almost no shock to anyone around the situation.
The relationship between Huggins and UC, particularly school president Nancy Zimpher, had become so strained that the best-case scenario had Huggins surviving through the Bearcats' inaugural season in the Big East and then moving on.
It turns out he likely won't even get that chance.
It shouldn't have gone down like this. That a guy who is as naturally talented as any college coach in the country isn't going out in better fashion is lamentable.
If you can, for a second, step back and take a fresh look at Huggins the coach – not Huggins stomping on a sideline, not Huggins on a police DUI video, not Huggins whom everyone says (inaccurately) never graduated a player – you will find an intriguing figure with incredible abilities but stubborn flaws.
There simply is no coach in the country whose teams played harder, practiced more ferociously or bought into a game plan more than Huggins' Cincinnati squads.
Ask any coach in America. They all have long marveled at that.
Coaching never was Huggins' problem. Winning games never was Huggins' problem.
Just about everything else was.
His stubbornness is what finished him at UC. No matter how many warning flags flew in his face, no matter how many trusted friends suggested a slightly different course – be it whom to recruit or when to call it a night – he just kept on plowing forward.
An extremely intelligent man from a small coal-mining town in Northeast Ohio, Huggins was a self-made coach. He got his first head job at Walsh College at age 27. He's won nearly 75 percent of his games ever since.
Give him a team, and he'd maximize its abilities, whether it was the ultra-talented 1999-2000 club that probably would have won it all if not for Kenyon Martin's broken ankle on the eve of the NCAA tournament or the lightly talented 2001-02 team that he carried to a 31-4 season.
He accomplished all that thanks to his belief that he could make things right where others were wrong. He always believed that, no matter how troubled the recruit, he could discipline him into playing well and living right. He long ago started graduating his players but never did enough to change the public's perception that his program did not care about academics.
He forever focused on the success. He forever forgot the failures.
But his bosses didn't.
Personally he lived as hard as he played, which was fine until his personal life became an issue following both cardiac and police arrests. Then, when all his friends said slow down, he kept pushing on.
In the end, the breakup at this point will be welcome. It was going to come. It was inevitable. If not now, then next spring.
The school long ago had made clear that it wanted a new era, a new image, a new direction. Huggins long ago made clear that he thought the current course was fine. He is a blue-collar, no-bull kind of guy who believes winning is everything in an increasingly glib and glossy business.
Cincinnati will be hard-pressed ever to be this good again in basketball, but that is a choice it seems willing to make.
As for Huggins, perhaps his future will be the NBA, perhaps it will be another college that understands how talented he is. But for it to work in the future, he'll have to make it work.
Because if he can get the focus back on what he does best – teaching the game – there aren't many who do it better.
