West Virginia men’s basketball coach Bob Huggins found himself in hot water this week after using a homophobic slur in an interview on 700 WLW in Cincinnati. ESPN host Bomani Jones wondered why no one on the radio side didn’t do more to save face.
Huggins was speaking to host Bill Cunningham, who asked Huggins a question about the transfer portal and whether he’d accept a transfer from Xavier University. Xavier is in Cincinnati, and Huggins previously coached at the University of Cincinnati. The Bearcats and the Musketeers have a fierce rivalry.
Huggins referenced an incident where Cincinnati and Xavier were playing and Musketeer fans threw sex toys on the court, which led to Huggins using the slur twice.
Bob had his contract amended to make $1 million less this season, he was suspended for the first three games of the 2023-24 season and has to undergo sensitivity training.
Bomani said the use of the slur was bad enough, but he thought that by referencing Xavier being a Jesuit school and looping in Catholicism into his remark should’ve been enough to get Huggins fired.
“That was the thing where he put it in the context of Catholic stuff, and I’m like, ‘Wow he still has a job! He actually did it two in one!'” Jones said.
Bomani added that if Huggins didn’t lose his job over the comments, that sets a precedent at the university moving forward.
“I think his difficulty on this is that this is going to create a liability issue in that if you don’t fire somebody for this, you can’t fire anybody at that school for saying anything halfway close to this,” he said. “And this is twice as far as anything you could typically get away with.”
Jones questioned Cunningham and the group he was with on the air when Huggins said what he said. Bomani called sports talk radio the “wild, wild west.”
“None of those guys stopped and said to themselves, ‘We should probably try to save our guest right now,'” he said. “Or, ‘We should probably try to save ourselves.'”
The point was made that had Huggins said this back before radio stations everywhere were so readily accessible online, this probably wouldn’t have been a story. Jones agreed and said the evolution of the world wide web has changed the platform talk radio hosts have.
“The internet really made that job a bit more of a high-wire act than it was before,” he said. “Because the net that you had was ‘Nobody’s really listening.'”
