One and Done in Manhattan

UPDATE: Michael Beasley now tells the KC Star he will honor is commitment to K-State.

"She stood there bright as the sun on that California coast/He was a midwestern boy on his own/She looked at him with those soft eyes, so innocent and blue/He knew right then he was too far from home"

...so begins Bob Seger's classic "Hollywood Nights", the story of a naive midwesterner who ends up getting jilted and heartbroken by a big city girl. It may not be playing on the radio, but it's certainly the tune they are singing this weekend in Manhattan, Kansas.

Anger coming out of Manhattan, Kansas today after coach Bob Huggins bolted town to head to West Virginia. Could they have expected anything else?

Huggins' stay in the Sunflower State lasted exactly 379 days. After being shown the door in Cincinnati, Huggins rolled into K-State with an attache case of nationally-ranked recruits under his arm. Guys like Billy Walker and Michael Beasley were suddenly ready to head to a program that hasn't seen an NCAA tournament game since 1997. But now a school that had been selling "Huggieville" T-shirts literally now sells ones that say "Traitor", and folks on the K-State message boards aren't exactly thrilled. As for Beasley, he's suddenly being coy about whether he'll ever set foot on campus.

K-State went for Huggins at a time when many programs were leery. Jemele Hill makes the case that they saved his career. But they knew the risks,too. In a venomous (and on-target) column, Sports Illustrated columnist Rick Reilly warned the program exactly what they were getting. Everyone in the country knew what they were getting. As Reilly said...

You sold your soul for wins. It's like marrying Anna Nicole Smith. She ain't moving in to cook.

Not everyone feels bad for K-State. Kansas City Star columnists Joe Posnanksi and Jason Whitlock eviscerated the school for taking in such a man in the first place. Apparently even Huggins knows he's screwing the Wildcats program. Athletic Director Tim Weiser says he confronted Huggins about the sudden departure:

"I asked him, 'Bob, do you think leaving now is the right thing to do?' And he said, 'No.' Then I said, 'How many times in your life have you known what the right thing is to do and not done it?' And he said, 'Never.'"

I guess the next time someone asks him that question, he'll have to say "Once."

It will be interesting to see if his K-State recruiting class for next season (ranked #1 in the country by some) stays intact, heads to West Virginia or just disperses into the wind. I feel bad for K-State fans, but after examining Huggins' lofty graduation rates and the other personal issues that eventually spelled his end at Cincinnati, I really wonder if they could have expected anything more. But they did. They invested their future and hearts in Bob Huggins, and he rewarded them with this. As one student told the Kansas State Collegian:

"He said come, and we ran. He said scream, and we packed it out. We did everything for him, and he just split."

Huggins may have taken off, but the school is scrambling to keep their program together. Here's hoping that after K-State's brief flirtation with dark side, they can get back together easier than the hero of Bob Seger's song could...

"Night after night, day after day, it went on and on/Then came that morning he woke up alone/He spent all night staring down at the lights of L.A./Wondering if he could ever go home..."