Bruce & Jimmy

Well, the first two rounds of the NCAA tournament are over, and neither Mark Prior nor Kerry Wood are throwing to live batters yet, so, until Thursday, I'm bored. I guess I'll use today to quickly address the Bruce Pearl/Illinois situation. Frankly, I don't care much about beating Pearl, I just want the Illini to win the game. I would, however, like to take a look at the fallout of that incident, and the impact it had on the careers of two men who are linked by it.

One thing I've always wondered about Pearl is what he thinks of Tom Davis now. By all accounts, Davis was the one who encouraged Pearl to tape record the conversations, going so far as to buy him the equipment. Tom Davis was a veteran basketball coach, he wasn't naive to the atmosphere of the coaching clique. He had to have had some idea of what the consequences would be for Bruce Pearl when the whole story broke loose. And when Illinois was investigated by the NCAA, the papers and pundits said it was due to Bruce Pearl's diligence (or dirty tricks). Davis could have taken some credit, or something, but instead, he tossed Pearl under the bus, pretty much torpedoing his chances at a major college coaching program(I believe that Dick Vitale went on TV and stated that Pearl had committed "career suicide". True to form though, Vitale had no such scathing statements for the good Dr. Tom). And so Davis had dealt a major setback to a conference rival, and it only cost him Pearl's career and reputation, which has only now been repaired, thanks to the fact that Pearl is a damn good coach. But wonders where he'd be now, if maybe Davis had taken some of the heat off him.

The other man who's career took a major turn due to the scandal was Jimmy Collins. Collins has risen to be Lou Henson's no. 1 assistant coach by the late 80's, and it was Collins who was recruiting Deon Thomas when the Pearl incident triggered the NCAA investigation. Although the NCAA found no wrong doing that involved Collins, some minor violations were found at the AD level, and Illinois was found guilty of "lack of institutional control". Until this point, Collins was considered to be the heir apparent to Lou Henson at Illinois. But for an assistant coach with no wins to claim as his own, having his name associated with an NCAA investigation was career crippler for Collins. Eventually, Jimmy would receive a token interview for the head coaching job when Henson retired, but the job would be given to Lon Kruger.

Collins and Pearl would both eventually land Division I coaching jobs. Collins would take over the Illinois-Chicago program after his apprenticeship at Illinois, and Pearl would claw his way back from Division II exile to take over Wisconsin-Milwaukee, ironically in the same conference as UIC. So now Pearl and Collins meet every year in the Horizon League, when just a decade ago, it seemed that they might meet as the heads of Big 10 schools. I'd like to say there's a lesson here, some sort of moral to be learned. Did Pearl do the wrong thing for the right reasons? Did Collins violate recruiting rules, or was he made the scapegoat for the failures of the higher ups in the athletic department? Nobody can really say for sure. Sadly maybe the moral is just this: when the shit starts flying, duck.