Jun 23, 2023 4 min read

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – I’ll admit it, if I had a say and a chance to name Bob Huggins’ successor to coach basketball at West Virginia, I’d pick John Wooden.

But seeing as he’s been dead for some time now he’s no more available than most of the active coaches today, most of whom are locked into big-time contracts as June heads into July, all those contracts with buyouts large enough to purchase a small Caribbean island and allow them to lay on the beach drinking pina coladas all day and not worry about whether this player is coming or going or having to stay up past midnight because ESPN says that’s a good time to put his game on.

I can’t think of a much worse situation to be in than athletic director Wren Baker, who has alienated a large portion of his fan base by giving Huggins a lethal injection after piling a DUI arrest atop of a homophobic slur on radio.

So is that Baker is trying to find a replacement for the big leagues when mostly its Triple-A managers or lower filling the replacement pool. And he’s doing it in a situation where he must figure out either if he wants a long-term solution or simply one to try and keep whatever is left of the roster together in an era when all of them have become free agents for the next month.

Already the social media is abuzz with talk of defections. Tre Mitchell, who did not go into the NBA draft because he felt he needed another year under Huggins, now is said to be ready to enter the transfer portal, although there is nothing official. And the latest social media revelation is that Arizona transfer Kerr Kriisa, who was supposed to give Huggins just the piece he needed, has entered the portal.

Both are not in any hurry as they await to see who becomes the coach. It isn’t so much that they want to leave, but they want to make an intelligent decision by seeing who they might be playing for in West Virginia.

One of the top transfer classes in the nation came to WVU to play for Huggins and make no doubt that the NIL money from boosters and businesses flowed greatly in part because Huggins was the coach and seemed ready to make a run in the Big 12 and then NCAA tournament.

Baker, apparently, has opened up and said that he had talked with assistants coaches Ron Everhart, who is a personal choice being a West Virginian out of the Huggins school of basketball and Josh Eilert, a likable enough sort but someone who hardly has the experience to succeed at the job.

Baker also talked with Jerrod Calhoun, a former Huggins assistant who coached at Fairmont State and now is doing well at Youngstown State, but that road from Youngstown to Morgantown is far longer and more twisting than it looks on your GPS.

There is talk about UAB’s Andy Kennedy, a close friend of Huggins and a former assistant which works for him as far as the boosters and donors go, but he has a past that has smudges on it in the form of an incident with a cab driver.

But that was almost a decade and a half ago and Kennedy has earned another chance and has proven himself capable at Ole Miss and UAB.

There is a longshot candidate that Baker probably has already contacted, but who publicly shown no interest in returning to coaching. That would be John Beilein, whose first Power 5 success came at WVU. If he would come it would make him the man who preceded Huggins and replaced him, which at least is worth a place in the Trivia Hall of Fame.

But Beilein is 70 and on a recent visit to Morgantown – his first since he left 17 years ago – he expressed no interest in returning.

“That ship has sailed,” he said in two different interviews. “There were many opportunities, lots of calls. I was at a point in my life where I felt like I wasn’t going to miss it.”

He did hedge his bet somewhat, saying “you never say never,” but added “it would take the perfect situation.”

Somehow, this doesn’t seem like the perfect situation.