MORGANTOWN — It is said history is written by the winners, which in the world of sports, makes a lot of sense.
Vince Lombardi, Bob Knight, Bill Belichick, Phil Jackson, Sparky Anderson — all of them legendary coaches based on the fact they won under different conditions over a long period of time.
Their careers are defined by trophies displayed on some wall, whether it be from the World Series, NCAA tournament or the Super Bowl.
What’s forgotten are the losses.
Connie Mack is Major League Baseball’s all-time winningest manager with 3,731 wins — an MLB record that will never be matched — but he didn’t even have a winning record, finishing with 3,948 losses.
Tom Brady has seven Super Bowl rings, yet he’s also just one playoff loss shy of tying Peyton Manning for the most in NFL history at 13.
Does any of that detract from their greatness? Of course not. In fact, an argument can be made that the losses, while not to be celebrated, also have a small place in defining just how good a coach really is.
Those guys all lost. Maybe not in bunches. Maybe not always in the biggest games, but as their wins piled up season after season, they still lost.
It’s with that thought in mind we bring up WVU men’s basketball coach Bob Huggins.
He, too, has lost games.
His next one — whenever it comes — will be his 400th career setback.
It will not be celebrated, nor should it be.
There will be no video montage played on the video board of the Coliseum and WVU athletic director Shane Lyons certainly won’t hand Huggins a framed jersey in a pregame ceremony with the number 400 on it.
Yet it will be historic, of sorts, and that shouldn’t be read as a negative, because it’s not.
It will be marked only in the history books, but it will be remembered by Huggins, which is where we want to take this story.
See, the man also has 917 wins, yet it’s those 399 losses that keep him up at night.
It’s those 399 losses he remembers with great detail, like they all came yesterday, rather than being spread out over 41 years.
“If you wanted one day, I could give you all the losses I had at Walsh College and at Akron,” Huggins said. “I can give you some from Central Florida, when I wasn’t even the head coach.”
What exactly does 400 losses mean? This is where the opinions differ between a coach and maybe everyone else.
It’s more than just a nice round number. It’s a symbol of how long Huggins has persevered, adjusted and rolled with the punches.
In order to reach 400 — it’s only been achieved by 21 other Division I coaches — it means he’s had to be better than most of his peers for a long, long time.
Otherwise, Huggins wouldn’t still be a coach.
If he hadn’t turned Akron around in just one season, and then continued to build on that success, who would have wanted him?
It took him just three seasons at Cincinnati to get the Bearcats to a Final Four.
If that wasn’t the case, we wouldn’t be talking about 400 losses today. We wouldn’t even be discussing Huggins coaching at WVU, because it likely would have never happened.
There is greatness to be found in those losses, as silly as that may sound, because Huggins found a way to keep winning over the course of 41 seasons.
To Huggins, though, the number is a source of pain, the kind that eats away at you from the inside.
How many of them could have gone the other way if just one small detail was changed?
Take away an injury at a crucial time. Maybe change up the defense on a certain possession.
Or even something as simple as pure bad luck, like Jarrod West banking in a 3-pointer at the end of an NCAA tournament game in 1998 on a ball that got tipped on the release.
“It sticks with you,” is how Huggins looks at those losses. “A lot of them were real close. How many times, just since I’ve been here, have people thrown the ball in at the end of the game and banked it in against us?
“It could be a whole lot more wins if those things didn’t happen, but they happen to everybody.”
They do happen to everybody, but the point is they didn’t happen to Huggins all that much in the grand scheme of it all.
Truth is he got to 600, 700, 800 and 900 wins at WVU before he ever approached 400 defeats.
No, 400 losses is no reason to celebrate, yet it also shouldn’t be remembered as some sign of failure either.
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