Skip navigation
Favorites
Sign up to follow your favorites on all your devices.
Sign up

Bruce Pearl’s coaching staff and the fallout of a show-cause penalty

spt-110823-bruce-pearl

Mike Miller

Over the weekend, Brendan Quinn of the Knoxville News-Sentinel published a story on the plight on the Tennessee coaching staff that lost their jobs and got slapped with show-cause penalties stemming from the infamous Aaron Craft barbecue.

We already knew about Steve Forbes, who had spent the past two years as a head coach at Northwest Florida State, a Junior College, accepting an assistant coaching position with Wichita State.

What we didn’t know, however, was just how close Bruce Pearl’s other two assistants -- Tony Jones and Jason Shay -- have come to getting Division I jobs recently.

Shay, according to Quinn’s story, has gotten a job offer from a school in the Big Sky conference which Shay did not want to name. It’s not the first time he’s gotten such an offer, however; a program in the Sun Belt and another program in the Big Sky had both hired Shay before the deal got kiboshed by a university higher-up. Jones spent last season coaching at a Knoxville high school, but left that job because he thought he had a gig as an assistant coach at a Big East school lined up. That, too, got axed, as did jobs with two different mid-major programs.

In the end, that’s what the goal of the show-cause penalty is. It’s a scarlett letter, a black-eye that is designed to make it as difficult as possible to get back into coaching, yet another deterrent the NCAA uses to try and curtail cheating and convince coaches to be forthcoming during investigations.

You can find Rob on twitter @RobDauster.