West Virginia Basketball: 10 candidates to replace Bob Huggins as head coach

The long coaching career of Bob Huggins has seemingly come to an end, as he will no longer be the head coach at West Virginia Basketball, agreeing to resign this weekend. The untimely conclusions of his time with the Mountaineers come after a DUI late Friday night in Pittsburgh and just a month after Huggins made offensive remarks on a radio show.

Huggins was born in Morgantown and spent most of his playing career at West Virginia way back in the 1970’s. He got his coaching career started on the staff of his alma mater and began his head coaching career a few years later at Walsh University. He’d jump into the D1 level at Akron in 1984 and would later have a long successful tenure at Cincinnati, though a DUI would end his time with the Bearcats as well.

Huggins returned to college ball with a brief stint at Kansas State before taking the reins of his alma mater in 2007. He led West Virginia for the last sixteen years, guiding them into the Big 12, and taking them to the Final Four back in 2010. Huggins had also taken Cincinnati to a Final Four more than three decades ago.

Across his entire head coaching career, Huggins won over 900 career games. He was a bombastic personality and has had a ton of success at Cincinnati and West Virginia, along with the other schools he’s coached at over the years. Unfortunately, his own controversial actions have put an end to a long and storied coaching career, meaning West Virginia is thrown into a coaching search in the middle of June.

It’s currently not known what direction the Mountaineers will take for this coaching search. They might choose to promote one of their current assistants to interim head coach, which is what Cincinnati did eighteen years ago when Huggins was fired. With all the actions already completed in the Transfer Portal, it could be devastating if the Mountaineers have a mass exodus of players, though there’s no guarantee that promoting one of the assists will prevent this.

Today, we’ll be looking at potential candidates for the West Virginia job, mostly looking at outsiders who would take this job today, though we’ll also consider them as potential candidates next spring if the Mountaineers choose to delay this search. Either way, West Virginia is a Big 12 school with decent history and resources and the right head coach could certainly produce a winning program. Let’s run through a few potential names that’ll come up for this position.