At the moment I pressed "send" on this column Monday night, the University of Memphis had not yet found a college basketball coach to replace Josh Pastner, who somehow convinced Georgia Tech to hire him before the Tigers brass fired him.
So by the time you read this today, Elvis U. may well have inked Wichita State's Greg Marshall, Virginia Tech's Buzz Williams, Middle Tennessee's Kermit Davis or Auburn's Bruce Pearl to lead it to its fourth unofficial Final Four berth since 1973.
Or it could be someone else, such as Dayton's Archie Miller. The only thing everyone knows for sure is who it won't be: former Tennessee coach Donnie Tyndall.
In fact, assuming his appeal falls on deaf ears, Tyndall won't be coaching anywhere in college basketball for the next 10 years, courtesy of the NCAA's penalty regarding Donnie Knoxville on Friday for violations he earlier committed at Southern Miss that were boldly termed "breathtaking and audacious."
Understand that the NCAA - in all of its warped, uneven history of gerrymandered justice - has handed down a 10-year show-cause penalty only once before. That sentence shackled former Baylor University basketball coach Dave Bliss, who pretty much wrote the book on how to break every rule in the book when he instructed his Bears to lie about the character of murdered teammate Patrick Dennehy to help hide how Dennehy's tuition was paid by Bliss.
Bliss wanted the players to say Dennehy had been dealing drugs before Bears teammate Carlton Dotson killed him, Bliss's goal to make the NCAA believe that all this unexplained money had come from drug deals, rather than Bliss's bank account.
Other than that, of course, Bliss was a swell, honorable fellow who had worked under Bob Knight at both Army and Indiana.
And if you insist on comparing Tyndall's 10-year show-cause for stunning academic improprieties, illegal money transactions and falsifying data to Bliss impeding a murder investigation to save his coaching skin, well, you can certainly see why the former Vols coach said of the penalty: "Ten years? That is so over the top."
But if the NCAA's charges against Tyndall are accurate, his tenure at Southern Miss was pretty over the top, too.
The NCAA charges that Tyndall, less than two months into his Southern Miss tenure, sent grad assistants and assistants to all points of the country to do work for incoming players not yet eligible so the IP addresses on the players' laptops would come from those players' residences. That strategy initially worked so well that the online course grades of at least a few of those players were roughly 1.5 grades higher than their on-campus grades.
Tyndall was also charged with facilitating cash and credit-card payments to two prospects, as well as disrupting the investigation by having a staff member fabricate documents and providing false information during interviews.
In one of the more shameless acts of dishonesty recently heard against a coach in the NCAA's crosshairs, he even used his mom's cellphone to contact those the NCAA was interviewing, presumably so he could influence their testimony.
What's oddly absent from any of this scandal is Tyndall's brief stay at UT, which lasted a total of 339 days and produced no postseason and a 16-16 record.
Maybe that's because he cleaned up his act. Or maybe he just hadn't had time to find a better way to cheat so as to avoid his third NCAA investigation in his third Divison I job, though he'd officially run afoul of the NCAA only at Morehead State when UT hired him. The launch of the Southern Miss probe didn't begin until November of Tyndall's time in Knoxville.
But this quote attributed to Tennessee athletic director Dave Hart on the occasion of Tyndall's introductory news conference does bear repeating: "(Tyndall) has a very genuine priority on academic success, and his track record backs that up."
Behind the scenes, most believe Hart took the word of a couple of close friends regarding Tyndall's character rather than fully vetting him. That mistake apparently won't cost the Volunteers any NCAA penalties, but it did further damage a men's basketball program that has seen far more stops than starts since Pearl first ran into NCAA issues in the fall of 2010.
Befitting his pitbull image, Tyndall not only plans to appeal but says he'll sue the NCAA if that appeal doesn't bring the result he wishes.
"The circumstantial evidence claimed by the committee to supposedly demonstrate my personal involvement in the academic violations has been contradicted by multiple interviewed witnesses as well as the results of lie-detector tests I took," Tyndall told various media outlets over the weekend. "There's nothing I want to do with my life besides coach basketball."
On a completely different cheating front that sadly touches a far more honorable former UT basketball coach, it's a shame that Pat Summitt's son Tyler could have wanted nothing more to do in his spare time away from his wife than coach basketball. Here's hoping he never used his mom's cellphone to contact his inappropriate relationship.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.