What to make of Mike Hamilton's resignation Tuesday? That Hamilton is on the way out is not surprising; the timing - UT's appearance in NCAA court is today - is curious at best.
At this point it seems appropriate to look back on the last three years of UT sports.
Wow, it was a crazy ride, no doubt, but what were the highlights?
The biggest moments - the basketball team coming within a basket of the Final Four and the improbable nature of football losses at Alabama and LSU - were near-misses. And that may be the best way to describe Hamilton's tenure - a near-miss.
He raised a lot of money, he made two hires that looked to be home runs but became hold-your-breath-because-anything-is-possible lightning rods, and other than a couple of minor sports (especially tennis), the men's products on the fields and courts have either taken a step back or stagnated.
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From near-miss to complete misfire, the Voluntees are nowhere near the top of the NCAA's most-wanted list. That spot clearly belongs to THE Ohio State University, which is mired in a controversy that started as gear-for-tattoos and has twisted into so much more that coach Jim Tressel resigned and the Heisman-candidate quarterback left school.
Couple or three quick things here:
• There will never be another SMU-level "death penalty" handed down by the NCAA. The TV money is too great to close the doors of a program. That said, the Buckeyes are in a lot of hot water.
• Terrelle Pryor was an all-world recruit and the top-ranked high school senior in the country. He eventually picked Ohio State a long while after signing day - not unlike Bryce Brown did with the Vols. New theory: Be very careful with high school recruits who extend the recruiting period into weeks after signing day.
• Pryor does not have much of a chance at being an NFL quarterback: His skills and throwing motion are nowhere near NFL-ready. He is athletic enough to possibly make a team as a receiver or tight end, but that's no certainty. Here's hoping he put a big chunk of those alleged illicit funds into savings or gets to keep some of those cars.
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It was not that long ago that the question about every major golf tournament was, "Who you got, Tiger or the field?" Now, sadly, after Woods pulled out of next week's U.S. Open, the only choice is the field.
Three years ago Woods won the U.S. Open, playing 90 holes on a shredded knee, and that memory continues to haunt us.
Woods still is battling the effects of those injuries, and we have to wonder if that will be the last great memory of a former great.
So it goes.
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The biggest question for most of the sports heading into Game 6 of the NBA championship series is how will Miami star LeBron James respond after two bafflingly non-engaged performances in Dallas?
Here's another question: How wild would a Mark Cuban NBA title celebration get? He could do "The Dougie" with Jason Terry or the polka with Dirk Nowitzki. He could pull off a move similar to Steve Martin in "Parenthood" when his kid caught the pop, or Cuban could go running across the floor, sliding on his knees and giving David Stern (and the head of NBA officiating) an arm-pumpin, double-one-gun salute.
The options are limitless. And sweet buckets, Cuban's NBA title acceptance speech could be an all-timer. It could be up there with Lou Gehrig's "Luckiest Man on the Face of the Earth" speech or be a total train wreck like Mike Tyson saying he wanted to eat somebody's kids.