The Beauty of Bob Huggins

Bob Huggins thinks he's misunderstood. He's said as much many times over the years, in part because people keep asking him whether he's misunderstood. He repeated it again this week, in a characteristically fascinating interview with ESPN's Jeff Goodman, saying "For whatever reason, when this whole thing started, they put a black hat on me and it's hard to get it off." This may be true, but it's hard not to wonder whether Huggins is digging in deeper with statements like that. I think that, at some level, he likes wearing the black hat; I think he knows, and we know, that he's not so much misunderstood as demonized for his utter lack of pretense. The thing about Bob Huggins is that he is just what he appears to be: an ornery, frumpily dressed, incredibly skillful basketball coach.

Huggins is 62 years old and in his ninth season at his alma mater, West Virginia; it will almost certainly be his last coaching job. We've reached the point where his reputation is due for a turnaround, in the same way people eventually came around to the wisdom of Jerry Tarkanian at UNLV. We always come around on the rebels, and I imagine the same thing will happen with Huggins, especially if he makes another Final Four, which is not at all out of the realm of possibility in this wide-open college basketball season.

Even after an ugly loss to Texas this week, West Virginia is in the mix for a Big 12 conference championship, and seeing as the Big 12 is clearly the best conference in the country so far this year, that would be a Herculean achievement. This follows a trip to the Sweet Sixteen last season, a remarkable run of success given that the Mountaineers haven't had a top 40 recruiting class since 2013. Huggins doesn't often bring in NBA-ready players like he did at Cincinnati; instead, he molds what he can get, breeding teams that press ferociously and chase offensive rebounds and force turnovers in the way Nolan Richardson's Arkansas teams did back in the 1990s. His style of play was one of the inspirations for Texas coach Shaka Smart, which means he's been around long enough that younger coaches have grown up studying him.

Oftentimes, even against superior competition, Huggins' ferocious style works. Occasionally, as in the 78-39 loss to Kentucky in the Sweet Sixteen last season, it falls totally flat. The key for Huggins is that he remains true to himself. He is nearly 20 years removed from that first Final Four with Cincinnati, and almost a decade removed from the academic and personal controversies that eventually cost him his job with the Bearcats. He has done and said some questionable things over the years, but his players seem to adore him despite his perpetual abrasiveness. He earned some emotional respect for the way he comforted his best player, Da'Sean Butler, back when Butler tore his ACL during the 2010 Final Four.

Huggins is comfortable enough with his own identity that he no longer feels the need to dress up in a suit and tie and sweat profusely during his team's basketball games. Once, during a tournament at Madison Square Garden, a security guard initially refused to let him in the building; Huggins wore his credential around his neck for the entire game after that. He told Goodman this week that he has hundreds of pullover jackets lined up in his closet, and chooses one to wear every game; most of them are black, he says, because "everyone says it makes you look thinner."

"I'm not a banker," Huggins said. "I'm not a politician. I'm a basketball coach. That's what basketball coaches wear. They all say to me, 'I wish I could do that.'"

There is a kind of beauty in that—in the way that, unlike some of his other high-profile peers, Huggins doesn't romanticize the role of a college basketball coach, nor the notion of amateurism. There is no question that at Cincinnati Huggins cultivated an image that wound up destroying his reputation, and at least some of the blame for that should be pinned on him. Huggins often raises a fair question, though, when it comes to world of college basketball: How much of the blame, or the credit, also belongs to the institution itself?

Huggins told Goodman this week that 30 of his 31 players at West Virginia have graduated. And then he did something that felt even more Huggins-eque—he took virtually no credit for it. "I had nothing to do with that," he said. "It's an institutional commitment… On one hand, we're told to stay out of academics. On the other hand, we're told to graduate everybody."

And so Huggins does what he can. He spoke this week of coaches who concern themselves more with wearing suits and appearing on television and "keep(ing) a chart and clap(ping)." I'm not even sure who he was specifically targeting with that notion, beyond perhaps John Calipari. He was much easier to understand when he went on talk about how he wants players who are enthusiastic about the game, "who like going to work."

There is a simplicity to his philosophy that becomes more appealing as the years go by. There are good reasons to believe that Huggins made a few key mistakes over the years—and that perhaps a little image enhancement might have aided him at times—but there is also something to be said for a man who does not pretend to be something he isn't. "I can't control what people think about me," Huggins said this week. The remarkable thing about Huggins is that, like him or not, he's never much cared about that part of his job.