Cincinnati and the family of longtime men’s basketball coach Bob Huggins announced Wednesday that Huggins is “living with a progressive cognitive condition.”
The statement did not say what Huggins was specifically dealing with, but that it has “begun to affect his memory and aspects of his daily life.” Huggins is set to be inducted into the Cincinnati Athletics Hall of Fame on Friday ahead of the football team’s game against Texas Tech the next day.
Huggins, 73, was the head coach at Cincinnati from 1989 through 2005. The program rose to prominence in his tenure and broke a 14-year NCAA tournament drought when it advanced to the 1992 Final Four.
The Bearcats ascended to No. 1 in the AP Top 25 during the 1996-97 season before finishing at No. 10 following a second-round NCAA tournament loss. In 1999, Cincinnati was the preseason No. 1 team in the AP poll, but lost in the second round again. It was the Bearcats’ fourth straight exit in the second round as a No. 2 or No. 3 seed.
Huggins resigned in the spring of 2005 following his DUI arrest a year before and friction with the school’s president.
After spending a season out of coaching, Huggins was hired as Kansas State’s head coach for a season before leaving to take the head coaching job at West Virginia, his alma mater.
Huggins spent 16 seasons with the Mountaineers before resigning and retiring in June of 2023 following a second DUI arrest. Weeks after his arrest, Huggins had his attorney send a letter to West Virginia saying that he had never signed a formal resignation letter to the school.
That arrest also came roughly a month after Huggins had been suspended for the first three games of the upcoming 2023-24 season and had his salary reduced for using a slur in a radio interview.
Before 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 victories came over his time at West Virginia.
When accounting for wins across all NCAA and NAIA divisions — Huggins started his career at Division II Walsh University — Huggins’ 935 career wins rank eighth all-time among men’s coaches.