Arizona’s interim Coach, Kevin O’Neill, said Wednesday he thinks WVU’s Bob Huggins is “probably the most underrated coach in America at any level.” True, they’ve been friends forever and coaches will sometimes engage in hyperbole when it’s their turn to take the stage — example: Huggins saying during his interview session that his team wasn’t very good.

The urge, though, is to agree with O’Neill, at least for this season. This in no way as easy as it was made to look with the nonchalance the Mountaineers exude when explaining their ascent to this point.

Of course, this may have been the perfect storm for Huggins. He inherited a pretty good team that had won 27 games, including the NIT, and while many of the returning players were young and inexperienced, many were also ready to hit their collective strides. There was Joe Alexander, a player willing and wanting to be molded into a star and a list of teammates who had an attitude. They didn’t like their coach abandoning them — many players declined to discuss that coach Wednesday — and they really didn’t like outsiders saying they couldn’t play for Huggins and that it just wouldn’t work until he got his guys on campus. After all, they were soft and he is not and the transition would prove to be too difficult.

Or not.

So combine that with the rather obvious and, I must admit, sometimes overlooked fact that Huggins is an extraordinary coach in tactics and in motivation and that he assembled a very capable staff of assistant coaches that players can’t say enough about and you get what’s transpired this season.

What it all means, right here and right now, is that it means nothing. Everyone’s 0-0 and this is the first game of three two-game tournaments and no matter the matchup, WVU will find an opponent that also had a great season. You don’t get here without earning that superlative and you don’t play here without meeting your match somewhere along the line.

This is worth mentioning because Huggins, for all his triumphs and titles, has had trouble in the NCAA Tournament.

However, after a stellar start to his 15-year postseason history, the West Virginia coach’s NCAA experience in more recent times mostly has been one of frustration and unfulfilled promise.

On Thursday night, Huggins takes his first WVU team, as a seventh seed in the West Region, against 10th-seeded Arizona (19-14). If the Mountaineers (24-10) play to the recent NCAA bad bounces of their coach, they may be one and done or certainly not headed to the Sweet Sixteen next week in Phoenix.

The WVU alumnus-coach is 20-15 overall, but only 9-9 in his last nine NCAA trips, and has gone past the second round only once. One of those losses was a stunner that resounded in these parts – to the 10th-seeded Mountaineers in a 1998 West Region second-rounder on Jarrod West’s game-winning shot.

In five of those last nine trips, Huggins’ team was a top-three regional seed. In seven of those nine bids, his Cincinnati teams were eliminated by lower-seeded entries.