As we reflect on what may be the end of the Kevin Stallings era at Vanderbilt, it's a good time to be honest with ourselves about what we expect from the basketball program.
In this day and age, it seems, the fate of any good-but-not-elite coach is either to be fired, or to move on before the wolves come.
That's the conclusion that Gary Parrish drew this week when Jamie Dixon, longtime Pitt basketball coach, jumped off to take the head coaching job at TCU. It is, as Parrish said, the obvious conclusion to draw from the career arc of Oliver Purnell, a man who managed to be employed as a Division 1 head basketball coach for 27 years in spite of winning 54 percent of his games -- simply because he always managed to skip town before the fans started calling for his head.