Huggins Explains Idea of Starting Next Season with NCAA Tournament

The Mountaineers long time head coach shared his thoughts on when he believes the NCAA tournament could be played.

In a recent over the phone interview with The Cook and Joe Show, West Virginia men’s basketball coach Bob Huggins offered an interesting take on how next year's college basketball season should begin. 

“So why don’t we start the season off with the NCAA tournament? The NCAA can get its money and distribute it to the schools. It solves a lot of problems… They know who was in it and who was going to play who. They know where we were going to play. What’s it going to take? Three weekends? Big deal. Really, kids aren’t going to miss class that much. You’re going to basically play on the weekends,” said Huggins.

The idea could be interesting for college basketball, but would most likely never occur simply because there isn’t enough time and money for the NCAA to support two tournaments in one season.

This year’s tournament was tuning up to be one for the ages with Kansas, Gonzaga, Dayton, Baylor and Florida State in the running for the four No. 1 seeds. A pair of those schools (Dayton and Florida State) have never even sniffed a spot at being one of the top two seeds. Dayton’s highest seeding in the tournament came in 2003 as a No. 4 seed when the Flyers lost in the first-round while Florida State played as a No. 3 seed four times throughout school history.

Huggins had his Mountaineers rallying for a deep tournament run after finishing the season ranked No. 24 in the country and on a two-game winning streak over Iowa State on Mar. 3 and No. 4 Baylor on Mar. 7.

Huggins also went on to explain why the timing would work for the tournament to begin the season as he believes football will be on delay with the concern of gathering so many people together inside Milan Puskar Stadium and many other stadiums around the country.

"Let's face it, there's a great chance we're not going to have college football. Putting that many people together is going to be rough. I wouldn't want to have to make that decision,” explained Huggins.

What about the seniors that would be graduated by the time the school year rolls around again in the fall?

“I think your underclassmen would start classes, but your seniors have already graduated. It's not a big deal. Let them come back and play. Why can't you make it their choice? We had three seniors. I guarantee you all three would want to play, and it would fill a void that was left when they couldn't play. I don't see what that would hurt to let those guys play.”

Although the legendary coach’s ideas on playing the NCAA tournament to begin the season in the fall sounds like a slice of heaven to college basketball fans near and far, the idea is ultimately seems unrealistic.