Perception or reality? Cincy prez has target on Huggins

Cincinnati president Nancy Zimpher is a bright-eyed bureaucrat with the zeal and naiveté of a lifelong academic. In her zeal and naiveté, Zimpher looks to be targeting the most important person on campus, a person more important even than the school president:

Bob Huggins.

Bob Huggins might not be willing to beg, plead and fight for his job if he's not wanted at Cincinnati. (Getty Images)

On Wednesday, Zimpher and Huggins began discussing Huggins' future at the school. According to a source, she has not decided whether to reinstate the automatic rollover she removed from Huggins' contract last summer after his arrest on charges of DUI. If you're Bob Huggins, that's bad.

Zimpher declined to speak with CBS SportsLine.com about Huggins, but this is how it looks: The controversial Huggins is bigger than the University of Cincinnati -- bigger than its academics, bigger than its athletics, and most certainly bigger than a former Ohio State professor of English literature named Nancy Zimpher.

Huggins is the University of Cincinnati, a status that Zimpher seems to face with mixed emotions. Presumably she's OK with the school's invitation to join the Big East, which will boost Cincinnati's profile more than a million research papers on primordial ooze or molecular genetics or whatever the campus eggheads come up with.

Presumably Zimpher is OK with the financial boon that moving to the Big East will mean to the athletic department, and by definition the university at large.

Presumably Zimpher is OK with having a basketball team that wins 25 games almost every year, reaches the NCAA Tournament and for the most part stays out -- yes, out -- of trouble with the NCAA's enforcement staff.

Presumably Zimpher is OK with all of those things. But she doesn't appear to be OK with her lightning rod of a coach, whose program has found its share of non-basketball headlines over the years.

Cincinnati has a national reputation for being an outlaw program, and look, there are reasons. Allegedly, Donald Little tried to set a roommate on fire. Allegedly, Art Long punched a police horse. You couldn't make that stuff up.

But for each handful of facts, there are a bushel of exaggerations and urban legends. If the average yokel in North Carolina -- me, two years ago -- wants to laugh at those renegade Bearcats and their complicit coach, let the yokels laugh. You'd think, however, that someone as close to the situation as Huggins' boss would know the difference between fact and fiction.

If Huggins, and by extension Cincinnati basketball, has a national reputation based on the occasional Donald Little and Art Long, so be it. But if that national reputation is overstated to the point of parody, it's up to the president to be (A) smart enough to recognize that and then (B) strong enough to get past it.

Zimpher, however, appears to be (C) neither of the above.

Numerous sources say she attempted to force out Huggins after he was arrested on DUI charges last summer. She didn't, but she did remove the automatic rollover from his contract, the fine print that will allow Huggins to keep Cincinnati at the Big East level.