Issue: Will the UC Bearcats return to consistent NCAA Tournament participation?
Message: Another depressing winter. I love my Bearcats, but this isn’t fun anymore. Everyone knows they need a new coach, but I’m not sure that will solve things with NIL and the transfer portal. I really wonder if we will ever see the day when they regularly participate in the (NCAA) tournament again.
Advertisement
Reply: Well, let’s start again by making an NCAA tournament. It hasn’t happened since 2019 and it won’t happen this season.
For UC, it all comes down to hiring coaches. It’s not a question of money and don’t let anyone convince you otherwise. (I used to be convinced of this, but I don’t believe it anymore, at least in basketball.) UC has enough NIL money to regularly build NCAA tournament rosters.
Things won’t change until university leadership changes its approach to hiring trainers. UC is the type of school that should take risks with its basketball and football recruits. Big city school in the shadow of the state of Ohio. Safe, status quo hiring is a ticket to irrelevance.
But the current culture at UC (from the president’s office on down) is to make those types of hires. UC leadership is risk averse. He prefers trainers who have regularly had winning records in previous stops, but who have not necessarily proven to have won big, or shown signs of becoming big winners.
The University of Cincinnati took a risk when it hired basketball coach Bob Huggins from Akron in 1989, if only for his demonstrative personality. Here, Huggins coaches the Bearcats during a game in 2005.
UC used to take a chance and hire guys like Bob Huggins and Luke Fickell. Tough coaches who were moving up in their careers at the time of their hiring here. Both were high-risk, high-reward hires.
Advertisement
UC basketball was a disaster when Huggins was hired away from Akron. But Huggins was a risk because he was not a company guy and had a demonstrative personality. Yes, that burned UC at times, but it led UC to a Final Four and consistently positioned the Bearcats to win big games and conference championships.
Fickell was a risky hire because he had not been a full-time head coach. But he’s an Ohio kid who coached on the national championship staff at Ohio State under Jim Tressel and Urban Meyer. He knew what it took to win at UC. He led the Bearcats to the College Football Playoff and consistently positioned UC to win big games and conference championships.
The administrations that hired Huggins and Fickell no longer exist. UC now has a basketball coach (Wes Miller) and a football coach (Scott Satterfield), both of whom had proven to be solid coaches before coming here. But neither of them showed signs of being great coaches. Both had stalled at their previous schools, but each checked some bureaucratic box from having been Division I head coaches for a decade.
And that’s how much you miss a coach like Curt Cignetti.
Advertisement
Getting back to basketball, UC should have an opening for a coach in six weeks. Good time for UC President Neville Pinto and Athletic Director John Cunningham to change their recruiting approach to a high-risk, high-reward mentality.
This article originally appeared in the Cincinnati Enquirer: Will the UC Bearcats make regular appearances in the NCAA tournament again?