More on the search

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Good afternoon. Just got back from 1920 Commons retail store, where I was dismayed to see that the milk shelves were replaced by a giant display of Red Bull. A sad commentary on college if you ask me.

Last week, I talked to three of the brightest minds in Ivy League basketball about coaching searches and Harvard in particular.

I only gave you a few quotes from Jake Wilson of basketball-u.com, Penn assistant AD Mary DiStanislao and color commentator Vince Curran. So here's what else they had to offer.

Wilson said that former disgraced Ohio State coach Jim O'Brien was a candidate for the Harvard job. Add his name to that of Mike Jarvis, who faced scandal at St. John's and you have an interesting pair for candidacy at America's most prestigious university.

"Both guys would come in with some baggage," From their end, I'm guessing they're looking at Harvard as an opportunity to scrub their images a little bit and maybe do some atonement "[Jarvis] had a pretty squeaky-clean reputation prior to St. John's."

As for what would happen if Harvard took on a coach with a name like Jarvis' or O''Brien's, which was the subject of my column this week, here's what DiStanislao said. And I wholeheartedly agree with both parts:

"It would be interesting. They may get a lot of mileage at first from someone with a lot of name recognition. Use all the cliches you want about the rubber hitting the road and the end of the day, it's all about getting the right people in your program and coaching them up the right way."

Curran agreed and expounded on Harvard's history of underfunding the men's basketball program, which has still never won an Ivy League title: "It comes down to what tools the university is going to give the coach. The big-school coach is not as big a deal as the big school commitment."

Today's Spring Fling forecast comes from NBC-10 via Philly.com:

Friday: Partly sunny. Highs in the upper 50s.
Saturday: Unlisted

That bad, huh?