Published: November 02, 2009 12:13 pm      

HERTZEL COLUMN - Huggins could have succeeded as football coach

MORGANTOWN — The way Bob Huggins tells the story it was 20 years ago now. He had coached basketball at Akron for five years, had built the program into a mid-major power, and was getting itchy.

The job in Cincinnati had come open and he was looking into it.

That’s when his athletic director made a call to the Cincinnati athletic director.

“They were both former football coaches,” Huggins said. “My AD in Akron told him, ‘You need to hire this guy. He’s a football coach coaching basketball.’”

That may not have sealed the deal, but it didn’t hurt.

Which makes you wonder.

What if?

Anyone who has seen Bob Huggins coach, anyone who knows his personality, knows his mind, knows that he certainly would have had a chance to be every bit as good a football coach as he is a basketball coach.

What if he were the son of a football coach instead the son of a basketball coach, might he have taken a different path?

“I played football,” Huggins said, not exactly surprising anyone who sees his size and knows of his athleticism. He stopped playing football only after he received a concussion and missed a basketball season in high school.

The truth is that Huggins’ father, Charlie, coached both basketball and football for a long time and, according to Huggins, enjoyed coaching football.

Even though Huggins was a basketball player at West Virginia, a team captain with a mind good enough that he was a two-time Academic All-American and a 1977 magna cum laude graduate, he wound up coaching basketball quite by accident.

Upon leaving WVU he went to camp with the Philadelphia 76ers.

“I was going to go to law school,” he said. “I stayed with the 76ers too long and by the time I got back here it was basketball season and Joedy (Gardner) asked me to help him and I started coaching basketball.”

And so it was that his path was dealt to him.

You wonder, though, if football might not have been even more intriguing to him with all of its intricacies.

“I don’t know,” he answered Saturday after holding an intrasquad scrimmage at the Coliseum as he gets ready for his third season at West Virginia. “We got to take five guys and they have to play offense and defense. I’d love to platoon. If we could platoon I think we could figure things out better.”

Certainly, the two are vastly different games.

“There’s so much more specialization in football,” Huggins noted when asked to point out the differences. “The offensive line never touches the ball. The guys who can run and can’t catch, you play them on defense. The guys who can run and catch, you play them on offense.”

The sports are different from a coaching standpoint, too.

While a position coach in football does have daily and sometimes close contact with his players, the head coach is more of an administrator. His contact is certainly more with his coaches than it is with his players, dealing mostly with his players in group settings far larger than 13 or so of them.

Knowing personalities, you have to figure that Huggins’ coaching style in football would have been far closer to Rich Rodriguez’s style than Bill Stewart’s or Don Nehlen’s, but be careful not to read any judgment into that for it always has been a matter of different strokes for different folks.

What works for a gander can cook someone else’s goose, so to speak.

You watch Huggins and you wonder if he would be comfortable coaching one game a week, some weeks no games, as football coaches do. Certainly, there is more game action as a basketball coach, more matching wits with the man on the bench, than there is football.

“In a lot of ways I think that would be easier [to coach football], because you have more prep time. For some coaches, they’d feel like no pressure because you only play a few games,” Huggins said.

But can a 13-game season be satisfying to someone who is used to playing 36 games a year?

“I’ll never forget when I was at Cincinnati, we were like 90 and second or third in the country, and my athletic director said to me ‘We’re off to a good start.’ And I said to him ‘I should have been a football coach. I’d be worried about going to the Orange Bowl right now.’” Speaking of bowl games, does Huggins believe football should go to a playoff system?

“I think football ought to have playoffs, but I don’t think we should play for the national championship in the second week in January,” Huggins said. “I think if all those guys were honest they’d say they don’t think it’s a good thing. This thing that the BCS is working fine … well, it’s not working fine.

“I can tell you this, if the NCAA was getting the money, they’d tell the BCS there is going to be a playoff.”