Coach K, Huggins Party Like It's 1992 as Other Titans Fall

Thank goodness for Mike Krzyzewski and Bob Huggins, because it's been an altogether depressing year for the marquee coaches in college basketball.

Jim Calhoun and Connecticut got decked by a team nicknamed the Toreros yesterday afternoon. Family and health concerns led to Lute Olson's leave of absence earlier at Arizona. Tubby Smith, Gary Williams, Jim Boeheim and Billy Donovan, winner of the last two national titles, begrudgingly accepted bids to the National Invitation Tournament, where the winner gets to shout, "We're No. 66!"

And poor Bob Knight has to sit next to Digger Phelps.

In this time of great eras gone by, it's nice to at least see the Uber Coach business thriving in Washington, where today Duke and West Virginia meet for not just a spot in the NCAA tournament's round of 16 but also an old-fangled morality play, rich with cultural labels and program prejudice -- everything, really, that incites college basketball fans to be uniquely twisted and illogical.

Krzyzewski's program is said to represent everything right and good about the game and Bob Huggins's latest program is, well, Bob Huggins's latest program.

It's St. Mike vs. Thuggie Bear, the Durham Blue Bloods against the Morgantown Maulers. Coach K vs. Coach Korrupt.

Pick a side before their 2:10 p.m. tip-off at Verizon Center, and please don't listen to either of them talk about their friendship and their genuine dislike of perceptions surrounding their respective methods and philosophies. It just ruins a good, if slightly manufactured, plotline.

"This is definitely no good and evil or whatever," Krzyzewski said. "And it wasn't then when we played Las Vegas, either. They had Greg Anthony and these kids who were good kids. And it gets stereotyped a little bit."

Said Huggins: "It is what it is. [In] 1992 we went to the Final Four with Duke, Indiana and Michigan, with all the blue bloods. And I had whatever I had, 10 junior college guys. What nobody really cared to find out was that they were double transfers. They were guys who started someplace else and the coach got fired or left or whatever and so they went somewhere else.

"And even though my guys were the most articulate guys in the whole tournament, they were funny. They were absolutely terrific. People still wrote that we didn't do it right."

Yes, some of Huggins's players at Cincinnati graduated. Why, Corey Blount, he said, just went back and earned his degree 12 years after he had been in the NBA. "I said, 'Are you going to walk?' And he said, 'Absolutely I'm going to walk.' And I said, 'I'll be there.' And that's what people don't get."

People also don't always get Krzyzewski, who gets propped up like a deity among a landscape of AAU crooks treating teenagers as cattle.