MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Bob Huggins is keeping pretty good company these days.
 
The West Virginia coach has become hunting partners with some of college basketball's best-ever big game hunters, names such as Krzyzewski, Boeheim, Calhoun, Knight and Williams.
 
North Carolina's Roy Williams got his 900^th career victory last Saturday against Florida State, making him one of only five coaches in NCAA Division I history to do so. King Krzyzewski sits atop the list with 1,168 victories, followed by Boeheim, Calhoun and Knight.
 
Bob Huggins will be the next to reach 900, hopefully as soon as Saturday afternoon against 17^th-ranked Oklahoma State at the WVU Coliseum. If not then, then in Kansas City next week in the Big 12 Tournament or the following week in the NCAA Tournament at the very the latest.
 
Doing something 899 times is a pretty good indication you've got it down pat, and winning is certainly part of Bob Huggins' DNA.
 
He won 73.2% of his games at Walsh, 67.8% at Akron, 75.9% at Cincinnati, 65.7% during his one year at Kansas State and 65% of them here at West Virginia crossing time zones every time he plays a road game in the Big 12.
 
Coaching at Walsh, Akron, Cincinnati, Kansas State and West Virginia is not the same as coaching at Kansas and North Carolina, for example, where Williams has worked. 
 
It's not Duke where Coach K has spent the vast majority of his career, nor is it Syracuse where Roy Danforth handed Boeheim a basketball program that had reached the Final Four two years prior to Boeheim taking over in 1977.
 
It's not Connecticut where Calhoun won the majority of his games and all three of his national championships, nor Indiana where Bob Knight became so well known.
 
"I don't think he's ever had the talent as some of the guys he's chasing in wins," longtime WVU assistant coach Larry Harrison, who has worked the longest with Huggins, said. "Huggs has always had teams where he's had to coach them and get them better. With some of those guys, we always joked they got McDonald's (All-Americans), and we've got the Burger Kings."
 
Talk about having it your way!
 
Huggs has won his own way and by doing it many different ways as well. When he was at Cincinnati, he won with explosive guards such as Nick Van Exel and Steve Logan, and he won with bigs such as Kenyon Martin and Danny Fortson.
 
Just think of all of the different ways he's won during his 14 seasons at West Virginia. He took his first WVU squad to the Sweet 16 in 2008 and his third to the Final Four by borrowing John Beilein's 1-3-1 zone defense because that's what the players he inherited were most comfortable playing.
 
He knew so little about Beilein's zone that he sometimes let the players work things out and make tweaks on their own.
 
That's pretty remarkable, when you think about it.
 
A few years later, when things were beginning to get a little stale, Huggins stepped back into time by reaching out to his old buddy Kevin Mackey to come up an up-tempo playing style for his Mountaineer teams. What came of it was "Press Virginia," which led to NCAA Tournament Sweet 16 appearances three times during a four-year period ending in 2018.
 
He won 21 games last year before COVID-19 shut down the college basketball season, and this year's team is poised to earn another high NCAA Tournament seed later this month.
 
So what has Huggins yet to accomplish in the eyes of the Hall of Fame voters? Win a national championship, of course, which has to be the only thing that has kept him out of the Naismith Hall of Fame for so long. 
 
What other reason could there be?
 
Coach K has five, and he got into the Hall in 2001. Calhoun, Knight and Williams have three each. They're all in. Boeheim got his only title in 2003 and two years later, he joined the others in the Naismith Hall of Fame.
 
Consider some of the players these guys coached - Danny Ferry, Christian Laettner, Grant Hill, Jay Williams, Shane Battier, Carmelo Anthony, Pearl Washington, Billy Owens, Hakim Warrick, Derrick Coleman, Sherman Douglas, Ray Allen, Emeka Okafor, Caron Butler, Ben Gordon, Kemba Walker, Richard Hamilton, Isiah Thomas, Steve Alford, Scott May, Kent Benson, Calbert Cheaney, Nick Collison, Paul Pierce, Rashad McCants, Sean May, Raef LaFrentz or Tyler Hansbrough.
 
Not too shabby.
 
"If Huggs had that kind of talent, he would have won some national championships already," Harrison points out. "But that's what makes him so special. He has been able to take players and develop them and get them better than they were when they first came in and develop a team into a championship contender."
 
Two of Huggins' teams were good enough to reach the Final Four - his third at Cincinnati in 1992 and also his third one at West Virginia in 2010.
 
How close was the 1992 Cincinnati team to winning it all? It was four points from beating Michigan's Fab Five to reach the big game that year.
 
His 2010 WVU squad lost by 21 to Duke in the national semifinals, but the roof only caved in once star player Da'Sean Butler blew out his knee in the second half when WVU was trying to make a comeback. 
 
And remember, that was a comeback team that year. Incidentally, one website listed Butler's injury as the second worst in NCAA Tournament history.
 
Speaking of devastating injuries, Huggins believes his 2000 Cincinnati squad was the best team in the country that year, hands down. The Bearcats were ranked No. 1 for 21 weeks until national player of the year Kenyon Martin broke his leg in the first round of the Conference USA Tournament.
 
Cincinnati recovered to beat UNC Wilmington in the first round of the NCAA Tournament before falling to Tulsa in the second round.
 
Who knows what would have happened to Huggins' coaching career had Martin remained healthy and that Cincinnati team won it all?
 
He's also had some other teams that were much closer than you think.
 
In 1993, the No. 7-rated Bearcats advanced to the East Regional Finals before losing to eventual champion North Carolina in overtime. Two-guard A.D. Jackson blew out his knee in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, which was a big, big loss to the Bearcats.
 
"We had gone to the Final Four the year before and returned six of our top eight guys," assistant coach Erik Martin, a senior on that Cincinnati team, recalled. "If A.D. Jackson doesn't blow out his knee … we just needed someone to guard Donald Williams, and the guy we had guarding him just got worn down chasing him."
 
Harrison was an assistant coach on Huggins' staff that year, and he remembers having a chance to win the game in regulation.
 
"We had a play that we ran and one of our players threw the ball out of bounds. As Huggs said, 'He threw it to the band.' We felt like we had a great chance to go to back-to-back Final Fours," Harrison said.
 
In 1996, Huggins' seventh-ranked Bearcats lost to Mississippi State in the Southeast Regional Finals the year Kentucky won it all. 
 
That Cincinnati team was led by forward Danny Fortson and guard Keith LeGree.
 
"That was the year we beat Georgia Tech in the Sweet 16 game with Stephon Marbury and a couple of other NBA players - and we beat them pretty easily," Harrison said. "We felt good about the Mississippi State game and their kid (Dontae') Jones came out on fire in the first half, and we couldn't stop him."
 
"To me, that was one of Hugg's five-most talented teams," Martin added. "They had it all: size, depth and good chemistry."
 
Huggins' 2002 Cincinnati club spent 21 weeks in the Top 10, won 31 games but lost in double overtime to UCLA in the second round of the NCAA Tournament despite 39 points from Leonard Stokes.
 
He's also had a couple of teams at West Virginia that were pretty close. His first one in 2008 was a free throw away from playing UCLA in the Elite Eight.
 
"That turned into a really good team," Harrison said.
 
In 2017, West Virginia won 28 games and had Gonzaga on the ropes with a chance to go ahead by five late in the game. But Nate Adrian, playing with a separated shoulder, couldn't lift his arms above his shoulders and was unable to follow up a missed shot.
 
There was also a long officials' review in the second half that allowed the Gonzaga players to rest and regroup when "Press Virginia" was having an effect on them.
 
"That was a national championship-caliber team," Martin said.
 
As was the 2018 squad, which gave Villanova its most difficult game in the NCAA Tournament before the Wildcats won it all.
 
"All of those teams were good enough to get to the Final Four, and once you get to the Final Four you've got a great chance to win a national championship," Harrison pointed out.
 
We're talking about seven or eight Bob Huggins teams through the years that were good enough to possibly win it all. If the ball bounces right or they get a couple of better breaks, Huggins is right up there on the ladder cutting down the net and holding the big trophy just like those other guys in the Hall of Fame right now.
 
That's how close he's been so many times before.
 
ESPN college basketball analyst Fran Fraschilla, who has known Huggins for more than 30 years, believes Huggs' time is coming soon, perhaps even this year.
 
Fraschilla publicly campaigned for Eddie Sutton to get into the Hall of Fame before Huggins last year, and now he believes Huggs' time has come.
 
"I felt that coach Sutton needed to go in before he passed away," Fraschilla told our Dan Zangrilli during last week's Mountaineer Insider Podcast. "I was grateful that happened, although I don't know if he got a chance to really enjoy it because of his advanced years and health.
 
"But Bob deserves to get in and his dad is still alive and his family is still around him," Fraschilla said. "His mom is not with us, which is why he has his fish fry to raise money to fight cancer, but I do think this is the year to put him in. Jay Wright is going in in a few years, Mark Few is going in soon, too, but I think this is the year for Bob."
 
West Virginia football coach Neal Brown agrees.
 
"Surely, he'll be in the Hall of Fame pretty soon," he said at the end of Thursday's video conference with the media. "I don't get that. I don't know a lot, but I know this, if you win (899) games that's a damned Hall of Fame career."
 
With 899-soon-to-be 900 career wins - at the places he's gotten them - you would certainly think so!