MORGANTOWN, West Virginia — Earlier today, West Virginia director of athletics, Wren Baker, met with the media and discussed Darian DeVries’ decision to leave the Mountaineers to become the next head coach of the Indiana Hoosiers.
Baker was asked several questions about DeVries, but was also asked whether he would consider hiring legendary head coach Bob Huggins. Huggins, 71, has expressed interest in returning to coach basketball again and would certainly be open to the idea, but Baker seemingly shut down the social media rumors about Huggins returning.
“Yeah, I’m not going to talk about candidates. I think I answered that last year by saying, I appreciate our tradition, especially his contributions to it. But really focused on the future and that’s probably the same way I would answer it today. Other than that, I don’t have a lot to offer in terms of specific candidates.”
Huggins is a Hall of Fame coach and took the Mountaineers to unprecedented heights during his time in Morgantown, but the way that he left the program likely makes it very difficult or impossible to re-hire. Following his embarrassing DUI arrest and firing, Huggins claimed that he never actually resigned from his position as the head coach of the program, and then it was later discovered that his wife, June, had actually signed the resignation letter. In addition, Huggins lawyered up and considered suing the university for wrongful termination but later reconsidered.
In a recent interview, Huggins said that he would love to remain in West Virginia but isn’t sure that he will always be able to. “I love West Virginia. I love the people and I love the state. I don’t want to leave West Virginia, but it doesn’t look like I’m going to have much of a choice. My goal coming back here was very simple: I wanted to win a national championship. I wanted to get a bus. I wanted to put the players in a bus, put the trophy in a bus, and I wanted to go from place to place, stop the bus, get the players out of the bus, take the national championship trophy and let everybody who wanted to, touch it. So they could go on for the rest of their lives, saying, knowing, saying to other people, ‘I got to touch the championship trophy.'”
