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

Chris Mack

There’s something rather unappealing in the term “retread hires” but it’s silly to dismiss them just because they were fired by another school. A few people on today’s list, with Huggins included, were retread hires that had success at other schools. While things didn’t go as expected for him in recent years, Mack could actually be a really great addition for the Mountaineers.

After playing his college days at Evansville and Xavier, Mack stayed in Cincinnati and was a high school coach before joining Skip Prosser’s staff at Xavier. He’d later return to Xavier under Sean Miller and succeed him as head coach in 2009. Mack’s nine seasons leading Xavier were full of success, leading the program from the A-10 to the Big East with a slew of postseason success. Mack recently spent four years trying to build success at Louisville but was fired in 2022, though it’s not like his successor has done any better.

Mack was awesome at Xavier and struggled at Louisville, though neither of his successors at those schools fared any better than he did. He hasn’t gotten back into his coaching these last two offseasons and he’s likely waiting for the right job to pique his interest. Is West Virginia the right job? Realistically, Mack isn’t the hire that’s going to wow the West Virginia faithful but it’d actually be a much more solid hire than it seems, whether now or later on.