Noted NCAA rules follower Bruce Pearl jabbing Nate Oats over Charles Bediako is peak hypocrisy
By David Wasson
Published:
We traveled down the road just a couple days back trying to parse out all the blame associated with the Charles Bediako mess at Alabama. Much in the same vein as how opinions are like bellybuttons (everyone has one, alas), your mileage certainly may vary from the one posited here: That the NCAA should take on more blame for said mess than Bediako or Alabama coach Nate Oats or even Alabama itself.
Just when you thought that everyone who wanted to chime in on Bediako had already splashed their way through the deep end of that pool, along came former Auburn coach Bruce Pearl on Tuesday night to offer the following during a segment on TNT…
… Nate said he’d play [Bediako] a 100 times again, what that tells me is Nate doesn’t really care about the SEC, he doesn’t care about the NCAA. And it’s fine, you’re going to care about your student-athletes, that’s fine.
“But you’re a member of this conference, and you’re a member of the NCAA. What about the rest of the teams, what about the rest of the players? Why should those five teams have to play against an ineligible player? I think it was selfish, and I think it was wrong.
Whoa. Time out.
Again, Pearl has just as much right to his opinion as the next talking head as well as any Joe Fan occupying a bar stool. And he is certainly more qualified to analyze, dissect and otherwise hash up the great sport of college basketball. Winning over 700 games in a future Hall of Fame career is all the résumé he really needs. On top of it, given Pearl’s natural disdain for the Crimson Tide forged in his years at Tennessee and Auburn… one could almost find his exclamation valid.
But here’s the problem with Bruce Pearl torching Nate Oats about the Bediako issue: Does Pearl really want to be lobbing rocks at anyone in regard to compliance and rules and selfishness given his glass-house background dancing around the NCAA?
Somewhere in the hallowed halls of NCAA HQ in Indianapolis must sit a thick binder labeled “Bruce Pearl,” detailing all the NCAA-related malfeasance the former coach wrought during his career. Last time I checked, Pearl is the only coach in the Bruce Pearl vs. Nate Oats debate to have not only been the subject of an NCAA investigation – he is the only one who was actually both fired and forced to leave the sport because of it.
That’s right, all you paragons of virtue. Pearl was torched by the NCAA in 2010 after both committing violations regarding the recruitment of Aaron Craft to Knoxville as well as lying to the NCAA about his role in it. The sentence included a full year’s ban from off-campus recruiting, a $1.5 million salary reduction and barring Pearl from coaching the Vols’ first 8 SEC games that season.
Tennessee didn’t get around to firing Pearl until after the 2011 season upon discovering additional NCAA violations. A couple months later, Pearl was given a 3-year show-cause penalty for lying to the NCAA – meaning he had to leave the sport entirely. Pearl did just that, accepting a position as VP of Marketing for Knoxville wholesaler H. T. Hackney.
OK, you say, everyone makes a mistake/a series of mistakes that turn what would have been a minor NCAA case into a major one. Surely Pearl learned his lesson to become the paragon of virtue he is today, right?
Wrong.
After re-entering the coaching game with Auburn in 2014, Pearl lasted 3 years on the straight and narrow before those 4 dastardly initials again reared their head in his direction. In 2017, Pearl assistant Chuck Person was alleged by the FBI to have received over $90,000 in bribes from Rashan Michel, a former NBA and SEC referee who ran a custom tailoring shop in Atlanta that had many professional athletes as clients – with Person then being accused of paying nearly $20,000 to the families of 2 active Auburn players.
Person was fired, but Pearl threw up a stone wall of silence that would have made the Ming Dynasty proud – refusing to cooperate with Auburn’s internal investigation despite being notified that refusal could lead to his firing. Auburn was subsequently unable to determine whether Pearl had been involved in any violations of law or NCAA rules because the FBI had seized his computers and cell phones as part of its investigation.
Having dodged that nightmare with omerta-like silence, Pearl was back at it again in December 2021 – as Auburn received 4 years of NCAA probation for violations involving failure to monitor Pearl’s assistant coaches while also not promoting an atmosphere of compliance. Pearl earned a 2-game suspension for his part in that issue, and for those keeping score marked his second NCAA sanctioning in less than a decade.
Listen, we aren’t going to sit here behind this keyboard and re-adjudicate Oats’ role within the Bediako drama. Been there, done that.
And we also aren’t going to sit here behind this keyboard and pretend that Pearl is the only coach who has danced with the NCAA over the years – even if he sports an unsightly 0-2-1 record against the organization. Cheating happens. Rules get broken all the time and are bent into pretzel-like contortions even more to suit one’s means.
But the hypocrisy of anyone with said 0-2-1 record against the NCAA lobbing stones at someone else’s window is humorous and marvelously tone deaf to witness.
Bruce Pearl, champion of rules-followers everywhere, stuck up for the NCAA on Tuesday night. We definitely didn’t have that on our 2025-26 college basketball bingo card.
An APSE national award-winning writer and editor, David Wasson has almost four decades of experience in the print journalism business in Florida and Alabama. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and several national magazines and websites. His Twitter handle: @JustDWasson.
