Tennessee Athletics Director Mike Hamilton told a local radio station he isn;t sure if basketball coach Bruce Pearl will be returning next season.
In an interview on WNML-AM in Knoxville, Hamilton said hw was working with Chancellor Jimmy Cheek and a the schools board of trustees to determine the fate of their schools basketball program.
Pearl may be on his way out despite making it to the Big Dance – The ninth-seeded Vols play eighth-seeded Michigan on Friday in the NCAA tournament.
“We don’t know the answer today,” Hamilton told the radio station of Pearl. “We’ve done a lot of soul searching about the direction of our program, and we’ll continue to do that, and we’ll decide after we’re out of the NCAA Tournament what direction it is that we’re going to go next.”
Apparently, Pearl has been working without a contract since revealing in September that he mislead NCAA investigators during a probe into recruiting, according to the Associated Press. In September, the NCAA charged him with unethical conduct and a handful of other violations.
The NCAA hasn’t released a final ruling, yet, but the school and the conference weighed-in. Tennessee reduced Pearl’s his salary by $1.5 million as punishment for lying to the NCAA and banned him from off-campus recruiting for a year. The SEC suspended him for eight conference games.
“The jury is out with what’s going to happen on that. He knows that, by the way,” Hamilton said later in the interview. “He knows that this is a tough situation.”
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