Cincinnati and the family of longtime men’s basketball coach Bob Huggins announced Wednesday that Huggins is “living with progressive cognitive illness.”
The statement did not say what Huggins was dealing with specifically, but that it “began to affect his memory and certain aspects of his daily life.” Huggins is scheduled to be inducted into the Cincinnati Athletic Hall of Fame on Friday before the football team’s game against Texas Tech the next day.
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Huggins, 73, was Cincinnati’s head coach from 1989 to 2005. The program rose to prominence during his tenure and ended a 14-year NCAA Tournament drought by advancing to the 1992 Final Four.
The Bearcats rose to No. 1 in the AP Top 25 during the 1996-97 season before finishing at No. 10 after a second-round loss in the NCAA Tournament. In 1999, Cincinnati was the preseason No. 1 team in the AP poll, but lost again in the second round. It was the Bearcats’ fourth straight second-round exit as a No. 2 or No. 3 seed.
Huggins resigned in the spring of 2005 following his arrest for drunken driving a year earlier and friction with the school president.
After spending a season without a coach, Huggins was hired as the head coach at Kansas State for one season before leaving to take the head coaching position at West Virginia, his alma mater.
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Huggins spent 16 seasons with the Mountaineers before stepping down and retiring in June 2023 following a second drunk driving arrest. A few weeks after his arrest, Huggins had his attorney send a letter to West Virginia saying he never signed an official letter of resignation to the school.
That arrest also came about a month after Huggins was suspended for the first three games of the 2023-24 season and had his salary reduced for using a slur during a radio interview.
Prior to coaching at Cincinnati, Huggins was the head coach at Akron for five seasons. He has a career record of 863-389, as 398 of those wins came with the Bearcats and 345 wins during his time at West Virginia.
Counting wins in all NCAA and NAIA divisions – Huggins began his career at Division II Walsh University – Huggins’ 935 career victories rank eighth all-time among men’s coaches.
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