Bob Huggins robbed of coach award

Bob Huggins took a West Virginia basketball team picked to finish sixth in the Big 12 to a No. 2 seed in the conference tournament.

Yet, a coach who led his team to a mediocre .500 record in conference play earned the Big 12 Coach of the Year honor.

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Texas Tech’s Tubby Smith was announced as the Big 12 Coach of the Year on Sunday. The main reason being that he helped the Red Raiders become a NCAA Tournament team.

But that’s not the case yet.

The Red Raiders finished seventh in the Big 12 Conference standings and have to play TCU in a play-in game on Wednesday in Kansas City. Currently, Texas Tech has 19 overall wins. Usually, 20 wins is the magic number to earn a berth in the “big dance.”

Also, aside from earning nine wins in the toughest conference in America, the Red Raiders really don’t have any quality wins out-of-conference.

They lost to Arkansas in overtime in the Big 12/ACC Challenge and lost to No. 16 Utah in Puerto Rico. Texas Tech did knock off South Dakota State and Arkansas-Little Rock, back in December.

But a team, with a successful coach, should be playing their best basketball at the end of the season.

The Red Raiders did end the regular season with a win over Kansas State, but they are just 7-3 in February and March. Not exactly world-beaters there. That kind of record should be an expectation.

Oh, and against the top two teams (Kansas and West Virginia) in the Big 12, Texas Tech is 0-4.

Bob Huggins, meanwhile, helped the Mountaineers defeat Smith’s Red Raiders twice and split a pair of games against Kansas, which has a Coach of the Year candidate in his own right, Bill Self.

On his pregame radio show before the last home game against Smith’s Texas Tech team, with Tony Caridi and Jay Jacobs, Huggins was asked about the race for Coach of the Year.

Huggins actually did praise the work Smith has done with Texas Tech. Also, he complimented Self on leading the Jayhawks to 12-conseuctive Big 12 regular season championships.

Self and Kansas are respectable in their own right, but this year at Texas Tech was subpar, at best.

The 19 wins are the Red Raiders’ most in five years. Still, compared to the success of the rest of the conference, that is a lousy record.

With Huggins and WVU, the Mountaineers won a lot of their games on a defense-first mentality. That success rests on the arms of the head coach, who has helped transform the team into one of the most-feared in the country.

WVU players give their heart to Huggins, and that surely is the case with Smith, too, but Huggins’ mentality was carried out by the Mountaineers for 24 regular season victories and a No. 2 seed in the conference tournament.

The Mountaineers went to the Sweet 16 a year ago and returned nine contributing players.

That’s one reason why Huggins likely was not the Coach of the Year. Because, he likely met expectations within the WVU community. If that spectacular regular season was the expectation out of the Big 12 Conference, why were the Mountaineers picked to finish sixth in the league?

Related Story: Bob Huggins moves ahead

Huggins was the conference coach of the year last season, and 10 years before that, he was Conference-USA’s Coach of the Decade with the Cincinnati Bearcats.

This award likely means very little to him. But it was something he and his team deserved.

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