Bob Huggins Tops Among Active College Coaches in Hall of Fame Potential

Ask anyone involved with college basketball and they will tell you that West Virginia basketball coach Bob Huggins is a Hall of Famer. Passing the 900-win mark last season and with a pair of Final Four appearances under his belt, Huggins’s enshrinement is all but an inevitability at this point.

Despite this, Huggins has been nominated for the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame each of the last four years and failed to even be a finalist all four times. As more years pass, Huggins’s predicament becomes more and more confusing. At this point in his career, what more could Huggins possibly need to do?

With his enshrinement earlier this week, Villanova coach Jay Wright became the eighth active Division I men’s coach to be in the hall. Matt Norlander at CBS Sports then looked at 12 other active coaches and examined their hall of fame potential. Unsurprisingly, Huggins was a lock to one day make the hall in Norlander’s eyes.

Norlander highlights the one blemish on Huggins’s resume, the lack of a national championship, as the reason for his exclusion. Ultimately, however, he predicts that Huggins will be enshrined very soon.

“Probably within the next two years,” Norlander writes. “He has the win totals, widespread admiration of many in basketball and almost never has bad teams. I’d expect him to be part of the class of 2022; no need to keep the man waiting.”

Along with Huggins, Norlander predicted Virginia’s Tony Bennett, Baylor’s Scott Drew and Gonzaga’s Mark Few as active coaches that will end up in the hall of fame.