One of the alluring characteristics of the NCAA Basketball Tournament each season are the undercurrents that bubble to the surface when certain teams end up playing each other. One of the more delicious background stories of this year’s tournament pertains to this Thursday’s game between the number one seeded University of Illinois Illini and the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, which is making its first appearance in the Sweet Sixteen of the NCAA Tournament.
What makes this game so interesting is that Bruce Pearl, the UWM coach, was the central figure over 15 years ago in a recruiting scandal that haunts the Illinois program and its fans to this day. Pearl, then an assistant coach at Illinois recruiting rival Iowa, taped a conversation with Deon Thomas — a hot high school basketball prospect — and then turned the tape over to the NCAA Enforcement Division. The resulting investigation landed the Illini program on probation and the NCAA banned the program from the NCAA Tournament for a year. A couple of Illini assistant coaches lost their jobs over the affair, and Illinois and Iowa basketball fans re-confirmed their mutual and everlasting distaste for each other.
Although Illini fans allege that Pearl turned on the Illinois program simply because Illinois had won the battle for Thomas and that Pearl himself was guilty of recruiting violations, the NCAA did not cite either Pearl or Iowa for any violations in connection with its investigation of the affair. Nevertheless, many in the cozy basketball coaching “fraternity” deemed Pearl a “snitch” and blacklisted him. Moreover, inasmuch as the state of Illinois was Pearl’s main recruiting territory while he was on the Iowa coaching staff, his tarnished reputation in Illinois at the time prompted him to leave the Iowa staff and start over at a Division II school. Even though he had been a rising star in the coaching profession at Iowa, Pearl toiled for 12 more years in the backwaters of college basketball before finally getting a chance to coach at a Division I school, and then only at the obscure Milwaukee campus of the University of Wisconsin. Four years later, his team is the Cinderella story of the tournament.
So, you might want to take a few minutes tomorrow night and watch a bit of the Illinois-UWM tournament game. Even though the players on both squads were just pups at the time of the Pearl-Thomas affair, you can rest assured that the Illini fans — as well as Coach Pearl — will bring a special intensity to this particular game.
And if Coach Pearl’s Cinderella team were to prevail over the mighty Illini? Moments such as those are the reason why the NCAA Basketball Tournament remains a colorful thread in the fabric of America life each March. Don’t miss the opportunity to see it.