For West Virginia head coach Bob Huggins, at the end of every season often comes the same question. Is this the end.
For the 69-year-old head coach, it was asked to him again on Thursday, following West Virginia’s 67-65 loss to Maryland in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.
While Huggins has never mentioned retirement over the past few seasons, he has never stated his clear intention to keep going. Huggins’ response on Thursday seemed to show he was coming back, but the question of retirement never seemed to cross his mind.
“You know the only thing I’ve thought about in the last whatever month and a half was getting these guys to a point where they could come here,” Huggins first said. “Erik for instance had never played in an NCAA Tournament. We want to get those guys to an NCAA Tournament and experience the NCAA Tournament. Unfortunately, ours isn’t is going to be very long, but at least he got to play in one.”
The longtime Mountaineer head coach finished this season with 935 wins in his career. This puts him as the active head coach with the most number of wins in college basketball.
Huggins is 65 wins away from reaching the 1,000-win mark. If he were to do that, he would be the third coach in the history of the game to reach that mark. On the flip side though, it will take likely three or more seasons to reach that plateau.
For now though, Huggins seems to be the guy for the job at West Virginia. Huggins said he has people who think he should stay, and has people who think he should leave.
“I don’t know. It’s like anything else, you know. You probably got people who enjoy reading what you write, and there’s people who say I wouldn’t read a damn thing he writes. I got the same situation going on,” Huggins said. “I got people who think I should stay on for quite a while, and there’s people probably thinking I ought to pack it in and let some young kid come in and screw it up.”
