378 days. The Coach Huggins era of Kansas State basketball. Plenty of good memories and the most success around here in years. It’s been good to get away, spend time doing other things, catch last night’s FB practice, and sleep on it. While still surprising, it’s time to move on; but I’ve got one more post devoted to Coach Huggins. I’m sure I’ll mention him again in passing like other former coaches, but for a fan like me this kind of brings some finality to the situation.
It’s kind of funny, it seems if anyone “deserves” to be really upset at Coach Huggins it’s a fan like me. I was one of those that had the most questions about Huggins a year ago, wondering about his past and those issues he would bring to K-State. However, I was eventually won over and came to believe in him. I thought he would be the man to lead K-State for years and bring us into elite or at least near elite status. As a K-State fan that had been through plenty of bad basketball, I was looking forward to it and I had been patiently waiting for years. Then the last 48 or so hours go down and like that it’s all over. I suppose I should be extremely ticked, but I’m not and I won’t be. More like disappointed and ready to move on. Like Weiser, I suppose I put too much trust in a man and it came back to bite me.
IMO Coach Huggins made the right decision for himself, mainly based on a love for his “good ole boy” friends from college and secondarily to be closer to family. I really doubt Charlie Huggins was pulling him to come home; he just wanted his son to be the best coach he could be. However, his buddies have probably been in his ear for years and after letting them down 5 years ago they weren’t about to let that happen again. I think he really came here with the best intentions (I don’t think he purposely “used” us), but as the season went along I’m sure the pressure mounted as they saw there might be a chance Beilein would be gone. I can’t blame those guys too much though, if most of us were in the same situation we’d do that too. So at the end of the day Bob Huggins had to decide what was best, make happy a selected group of folks that he’s known for years and crush thousands he’d known for one, or make happy thousands and crush the few. The few won out b/c the relationship was so much more developed and he was tight with those guys. I can understand that. It doesn’t make it right and it doesn’t change the fact that he screwed over an entire fan base. As a result, I don’t think Huggins is a complete snake; he’s just a man with flaws like all of us. We all have been in situations where we say we believe in certain things (like loyalty and commitment), but when it really comes down and other things pull on us those are conditional and we’re going to alter those to best fit our own ambitions. That’s what Coach did IMO and I’m not going to throw him under the bus for that. I do think at the end of the day it reflects well on K-State; we were willing to give a guy a chance and support that few others were willing to give and we got burnt a bit. To me that just reflects the kind of folks K-Staters really are and I’ll choose to focus on that.
If reports are true that he called recruits, yeah that’s disappointing too, but the ultra-competitiveness of Coach Huggins (that we have to acknowledge pushed him to the edge of “right and wrong” before he got here and while he was here even) isn’t going to change with this decision and for us not to expect that is silly. He wants to go to West Virginia and do the same and he’ll likely build a great program there before he retires. He’s going to use the same methods to do that to get us on the verge of greatness here. It’s really hypocritical of us to lambaste him for doing the essentially same thing at West Virginia that he did here.
So I’ve lost most of the respect I had for Coach as he leaves us in a lurch, but I’ll get over it. As I’ve always done as a K-State basketball fan I’ll move on. In the end I probably haven’t lost as much respect for Coach as for Tom Asbury who IMO did all but quit on this university. Nor will I respect him as much as Jim Wooldridge who definitely wasn’t near the coach as Huggins, but IMO had more true loyalty and commitment. So that’s it, the Coach Huggins era is over and its time to move on. I suppose more of me wants to say thank you and good luck than curse the man, so I’ll leave it at that.
