When Bob Huggins was arrested for drunk driving the other night, I wasn’t really surprised. Controversy seems to follow him around, so an arrest seemed inevitable. I’ve never hid my disdain for the man. Bob Huggins brings in all sorts of thugs and misfits to play basketball at Cincinnati, and when they are there, he seems to make no effort to straighten them out. Oh sure, he’s an extremely demanding coach and he screams and yells to make sure they do want he wants, but that’s only on the court. Off the court, it seems that he couldn’t care less about what happens with his players. His abysmal graduation rates bear this out. If he really wanted to help out the guys with checkered backgrounds, he’d start with making them go to class and get something positive out of their scholarship.
So, again, I wasn’t surprised he was arrested. He strikes me as a guy who sees himself as above the rules of regular men. I was pretty surprised at just how drunk he was. The dude could barely stand! He looked like Larry Eustachy after a Sigma Chi kegger.
Now, I don’t really consider DUI a moral offense, unless it happens more than once. More likely, it’s just the result of poor judgement, impaired judgment at that. So, since it wasn’t an NCAA violation (yet, that is. According to Huggins, he was out drinking with a recruit’s family, which would be a violation, as this is a recruiting “dead” period.), I’m not surprised Cincinnati didn’t fire him. I think indefinite suspension is the right punishment for the crime.
The thing that really impressed me about the whole thing though was how well Huggins handled it. As a guy who I think is a total ass and a bully, I expected him to go the Bobby Knight route with this. I thought he’d play down the whole incident and blame it all on everyone else. Knight would have taken every chance to say that the cops were jerks, the media was blowing it out of proportion, the administration was out to get him and that Dale Brown is an idiot. Instead, Huggins took it like a man. He went to the press conference where they announced his suspension and he gave comments afterward. He was very contrite and apologetic. Never once did he blame the incident on anyone else or imply that he wasn’t fully to blame.
So, despite the black mark the arrest left on his record, I actually think more of Bob Huggins now than I did before. Funny, huh?