WASHINGTON – Want to know how much West Virginia’s 73-67 NCAA second-round upset of Duke Saturday meant to coach Bob Huggins?
Want to know how much the Mountaineers’ Sweet 16 berth meant to their school, their conference and even their entire state?
If you’d seen Huggins hugging nearly every friendly face at the Verizon Center – first his players, then school president Mike Garrison, and finally even Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese – you’d know.
“I’m really happy for our guys, happy for Darris (Nichols) and happy for Jamie (Smalligan). Jamie texted me (Friday night) and said, ‘Coach, it’s a better match-up if I don’t start.’ How many teams have guys like that?” Huggins said. “I’m really, really happy for them. Certainly I’m happy for the university and you know . . . how much this means to our state.”
The seventh-seeded Mountaineers’ Sweet 16 date Thursday with Xavier will be sweet for so many reasons.
WVU (26-1) was relegated to the NIT last year and then lost coach John Beilein to Michigan.
And losing coaches to the Wolverines is a hot-button topic after Rich Rodriguez bolted for Ann Arbor and got sued for breach of contract.
But as for Huggins, this native son bleeds Mountaineer old gold and blue.
Cincinnati fired him following a DUI, and after a year at Kansas State, he’s returned to his alma mater and showed that he can win with Beilein’s players. Huggins – who coached two weeks after a 2002 heart attack – instilled his toughness into Beilein’s finesse jump-shooting holdovers, proving he can coach as well as recruit.
“He gives you that swagger, that confidence,” said Da’Sean Butler, a sophomore from Newark averaging 12.9 ppg.
“Sometimes you just need him to get into us like men, and challenge us like men to go out and play as hard as we can. That’s what he did, and we took care of business.”
They did it by beating a Duke team that’s arguably the flagship of the ACC – the league that raided the Big East and nearly left the conference for dead.
“Playing in the Big East gets you tougher . . . and everybody saw that as we played an ACC school and not only held our own but went well beyond that,” said Joe Alexander, who’s averaged 23.5 ppg in his last 10, WVU going 8-2.
“Duke’s a great team, but I think they fit in well in the Big East. They definitely wouldn’t dominate the Big East. I think the top six or seven teams are definitely right on par with Duke in the Big East.”