On this same day, former University of Cincinnati men’s basketball coach Bob Huggins made his
return to Cincinnati with his Kansas State team in-tow to battle Xavier at U.S.
Bank Arena.
Was it a coincidence a story shedding poor press on the former UC bosses
program be released on the day of his return? Or was it another way the local paper
found to fuel the flames that have lowered in the recent months? After talking with members of the
Cincinnati athletics department I found way too
many reasons to feel the Enquirer didn’t do Bob Huggins or the University of Cincinnati a favor by running the story on
this date.
As internet message boards and chat rooms quickly filled
with Huggins supporters, their venom against UC stirred the masses reaching
local and national news. Did UC
release their APR information just in time to place an attack on Bob
Huggins? The answer was soon
learned when Bearcat Insider contacted Senior Associate Athletics Director Mike
Waddell who was out of town tending to a death in his family.
Waddell had the following to say about the Enquirer story. “We freely released the APR information
to Lori Kurtzman in November for a story she was working on. Lori is part of the news side of the
Enquirer and not the sports side.
When we asked when the story was going to be released in the paper we’d
been told it would appear in a Sunday edition sometime in December. The last time anyone from the Enquirer
contacted the university to receive any additional information on the subject
came in mid December.”
The uproar from the front page story threw the sports
side of the Enquirer into full attack mode as Paul Daugherty’s article “Huggs
front and center” accused the University of Cincinnati of making the APR numbers
available just in time for Huggins return and went as far as calling the Huggins
versus UC match-up a game of one up-manship.
While Daugherty could have stopped there he extended it by calling
Huggins this generation’s Pete Rose.
How he came up with this comparison is beyond me since Rose is banned
from the game of baseball and Huggins only took a season off before taking over
at K-State.
While UC’s seen its share of poor press since Huggins release, this story
looks like a clear attempt by the Enquirer to push papers and leave the
Cincinnati
athletics department looking spiteful towards a chapter of UC basketball history
many have closed the book on. Don’t
look for this story to settle into the limelight anytime soon. If I was UC I’d be asking some serious
questions as to why this story was held so long with a release coming the day a
coach who’s been removed for the past two season’s returns to the city he once
ruled.