Bob Huggins will maintain his job as the pinnacle males’s basketball coach at West Virginia, the college mentioned Wednesday, however shall be suspended for 3 video games and obtain a pay minimize after he used an anti-gay slur twice and derisively mocked Catholics throughout an interview with a Cincinnati radio station this week.
The college mentioned it could rework Huggins’s contract and scale back his annual wage by $1 million, down from $4.15 million. He shall be required to bear sensitivity coaching and can miss the primary three video games of the 2023-24 season.
In a joint assertion, the college’s president and athletic director mentioned Huggins, the winningest energetic coach in Division I males’s basketball, can be instantly fired if he made any comparable offensive feedback sooner or later.
Throughout an interview Monday on the Cincinnati radio station 700 WLW, Huggins described followers of Xavier College, a Jesuit establishment, utilizing a homophobic slur and underscored the college’s spiritual affiliation. Whereas discussing his 16-season tenure with the College of Cincinnati and the college’s intracity rivalry with Xavier, Huggins twice directed a homophobic slur towards Xavier followers, referring to those that would “throw rubber penises on the ground, after which say they didn’t do it.”
Huggins, 69, issued an apology as a part of the college’s assertion, saying he deeply regretted his feedback and the harm that they had triggered.
“I’ve no excuse for the language I used, and I take full duty,” he mentioned in Wednesday’s assertion. “I’ll abide with the actions outlined by the College and Athletics management to be taught from this incident. I’ve had a number of conversations with colleagues and mates that I deeply respect and admire over the past 24 hours, and I’m keenly conscious of the ache that I’ve triggered.”
Except for the pay minimize, Huggins will make a private donation to Xavier to assist its Middle for Religion and Justice and its Middle for Variety and Inclusion, although the quantity of the donation was not specified. He will even be required to fulfill with L.G.B.T.Q. leaders from throughout the state of West Virginia.
In August 2021, Huggins signed a contract extension by way of the 2023-24 season that made him one of many highest-paid coaches in faculty basketball. In line with his earlier contract, Huggins would have had choices to educate “or prolong his relationship” with the college by way of June 2027. In Wednesday’s announcement, the college mentioned Huggins’s present contract can be amended to a year-by-year settlement that might finish on April 30, 2024.
The college’s assertion mentioned the $1 million trimmed from Huggins’s wage can be used to assist its L.G.B.T.Q. heart, its psychological well being counseling heart and different organizations.
“Whereas the College has by no means and can by no means condone the language used on Monday, we’ll use this second to teach how the informal use of inflammatory language and implicit bias have an effect on our tradition, our group and our well being and well-being,” the assertion mentioned.
Huggins has coached at West Virginia since 2007. He was inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Corridor of Fame in 2022 and is one in every of solely six males’s coaches to build up 900 profession wins in Division I.
