This is NCAA tournament No. 23 for Bob Huggins. He’s reached two Final Fours, two Elite Eights and two Sweet Sixteens. He’s also lost on the opening weekend a not-too-sweet 15 times, and he’s 16-6 in the opening game (and 7-9 in the second game).

Those 15 losses?

When he as at Akron: No. 5 Michigan in 1986.

At Cincinnati: Wisconsin in 1994, No. 8 UConn in 1995, No. 18 Iowa State in 1997, West Virginia in 1998, Temple in 1999, No. 18 Tulsa in 2000, No. 2 Stanford in 2001, UCLA in 2002 (in a double-overtime classic), Gonzaga in 2003, No. 13 Illinois in 2004, No. 7 Kentucky in 2005.

At WVU: Dayton in 2009, No. 11 Kentucky in 2011, Gonzaga in 2012 and Stephen F. Austin last season.

Nine of the 16 losses were to ranked teams. Some of the unranked teams were or still are good programs. Huggins had some really good, highly ranked teams that didn’t get through the first two weekends, and of the teams that beat Huggins, the ones that look weird are … well, the Mountaineers were nice in 1998. I guess Dayton and Stephen F. Austin look out of place.

Bucknell would look out of place, too, and Huggins doesn’t dismiss the possibility. He nearly did the unthinkable in 1986, and that set the stage for his career in the NCAA tournament.

Huggins was in his third season at Akron, his first Division I head coaching job, when the Zips reached the NCAA tournament. They were the No. 15 seed in the Midwest region and matched up with No. 2 seed Michigan.

“We were the lowest seed in the whole tournament, I guess,” Huggins remembered. We were playing the No. 1 seed — Michigan was No. 1 in the country for the whole year. That was before the Fab Five.”

Some of this is a bit inaccurate, but who cares? It was before the Fab Five, but Roy Tarpley, Gary Grant, Antoine Joubert, Robert Henderson and Glen Rice were pretty good!

Huggins needed help, so he called Eldon Miller, the head coach at Ohio State, where Huggins was an assistant coach from 1978-80.

“What do we do to beat them?” Huggins asked.

“You can’t,” Miller replied.

“What do you mean we can’t?”

“You can’t.”

Looking for answers, Huggins started asking questions.

“If we press them,” he asked, “can we slow them down?”

“No.”

“If we press them, can we speed them up?”

“No.”

Now Huggins was miffed.

“So you don’t think we have any chance to win it?”

“I told you that.”

And that was that.

“So then you go through film and see some things they struggled against, so all I did was show our guys what they struggled with, which wasn’t very much, by the way,” Huggins said.

Akron led by two at halftime and lost 70-64.

“We dropped it out of bounds a couple times when we shouldn’t have,” Huggins said. “But we were in the game. Then you sit there and look at it and say, ‘How do you ever advance in this tournament when you have to play people like this every night?'”

Huggins spent three more years without a NCAA tournament bid at Akron and then moved to a different part of Ohio and a different level of the college basketball stratosphere when he was named the head coach at Cincinnati after the 1988-89 season. Two NIT bids preceded the 1992 NCAA tournament, and the Bearcats made it all the way to the Final Four.

“Then I’m thinking, ‘This isn’t that hard,'” Huggins said. “The next year, we played (North) Carolina, and some calls didn’t go our way at the end — and Coach (Dean) Smith kicking the scorer’s table didn’t have anything to do with it. But there were some things that didn’t go our way, and we lost to them in overtime. They go on to win the national championship, when we felt like we really could have.”