Bruce Pearl Coaches Crackheads. Yeah! Take That!

As longtime readers know, we never miss an opportunity to knock around Tennessee coach Bruce Pearl. We know this isn't fair — he's a great coaching story, he's done a great job and the man is a world champion sweater — but Bruce Pearl's fate was sealed with us back in the early '90s when he was an assistant coach at Iowa. It's not fair, we know, and we don't really care. Bruce Pearl could cure cancer, find Osama bin Laden and write a script that would erase the words "Skip" and "Bayless" from the vocabulary, and we'd still hate him. Sorry. It's how we feel.

Anyway, Pearl's having all kinds of trouble with his Volunteer charges these days. Two of his players were arrested for possessing 15.2 grams of crack cocaine. That's a lot of crack, enough that police could charge them with intent to distribute.

Despite jokes that the crack cocaine could explain Pearl's sweating problem, this isn't inherently Pearl's fault, though it's hard to imagine, say, Dean Smith coaching guys busted for crack. But we're going to enjoy watching him squirm anyway. We won't lie to you: If we could choose an Official Deadspin Villain, it would be Bruce Pearl. And again: We know it's not fair, and we don't care. Hating Bruce Pearl was a notion we understood long before we understood "fairness."

Pearl s 'High Standards' Put Players Futures In Doubt [Nashville City Paper] Putting The Rock Back In Rocky Top [Taylor Bunts]