Arkansas Business

This story is from the archives of ArkansasSports360.com.

In the end, it won't be any shady recruiting or poorly timed in-person recruiting visits that led to Bruce Pearl's firing at Tennessee after a great run as Volunteers basketball coach; it will be his lying to investigators.

It won't be the trading of memorabilia for tattoos or the car deals for Terelle Pryor that has cost Jim Tressel his job as football coach at Ohio State, but rather the lying about how much he knew and when he knew it.

These guys grew up in the Watergate era but didn't take much from the biggest presidential scandal of our time. It's not the act of wrongdoing as much as it's the lie trying to cover it up.

The NCAA enforcement staff doesn't seem to nail the outright cheaters these days the way it did back in the day when Oklahoma football was on probation nearly as many times as the Sooners won national championships. The NCAA rule enforcement staff always lacked court-of-law subpoena power to draw out the truth in its investigations, but somehow it always seemed to get the goods on the likes of SMU, whose small but powerful group of boosters decided the corruption in football around them in the 1970s in Texas was so widespread, they'd flaunt it in the NCAA's face.

The penalties incurred by SMU eventually became the first and only death penalty given a NCAA Division I football program, and SMU's cocky-turned-bitter boosters took down their Southwest Conference neighbors with it, leading to the eventual collapse of the league.

It wasn't about lying then; it was out-and-out buying of players, and SMU's arrogance caught up with the Ponies.

Now, the SMU Pony Express style of program building might escape scot-free from the NCAA's long arm as long as some Mustang official didn't lie to investigators, or if some wannabe agent didn't start singing because the parents of some superstar running back didn't let him represent their kid.

The NCAA winks at the inherent corruption. "Hey, we know rule-skirting goes on everywhere, and smart coaches move faster than we can change the rules on them, but we have to pretend that we police the place."

By their dishonesty in answering questions, rather than what they allowed to go on within their programs, Pearl and Tressel handed the investigators and the circling sharks of the New Media their own condemnation papers.

Consider both of these guys, charismatic in their own ways -- Pearl in his Sunkist orange-colored blazer treating everybody like the Delta House rush chairman and damn glad to meet you; Tressel in the sweater vest and professorial glasses and coiffure, ready to pass everyone in class with an A if they simply show up. Tennessee fans, up until the day Pearl was fired by Mike Hamilton, UT's athletic director and the guy who really should have been axed in Knoxville, were backing their coach at an 80 percent approval rating. Had Tennessee held a statewide election between Pearl and Hamilton on who needed to go, Pearl would have kept his job in a landslide and been proclaimed athletic department king for life.

Pearl was done in by denying that an improper recruiting contact was made at his home, even though photos from the event indicated otherwise. So, he tearfully backtracked, but then went out days later and allegedly broke more recruiting rules. It took the SEC office, rather than Hamilton, to sit Pearl for eight conference games this past season.

Not only did Tressel have (and still has) many Ohio State fans eating out of his hand as bits and pieces of the tattoo scandal seeped out, and as we learned he'd been lying all along, his university president, Gordon Gee, was so demonstrative in his support of the head coach, he said hoped Tressel wouldn't fire him.