The stain that will not fade

Mike Gundy is staying in Oklahoma, which must be infuriating to those who believe "Rocky Top" is the greatest song ever written, and Tennessee orange is the greatest shade of orange ever conceived, and how the heck could anyone choose Stillwater, Okla., over the beauty and cosmopolitan bonhomie of Knoxville, Tenn.?

But Gundy decided Stillwater and his alma mater, Oklahoma State, was where he'd rather stay, and now the coaching search in Knoxville is veering alarmingly close to parody. Someone, after all, painted "Bring Lane home" on Tennessee's landmark rock -- Lane, of course, being Lane Kiffin, who  had to have a police escort out of town after dumping Tennessee to go shack up with USC.

That's not the most alarming thing to be painted on the rock recently, however.

That would be what was painted there at the height of the horrendously botched Greg Schiano non-hire, when some UT fan accused Schiano of facilitating child rape because he was an assistant coach at Penn State during the whole sordid Jerry Sandusky business.

This was character assassination at its worst, and it didn't end there. Several renegade social media types fanned the flames, even though the only thing linking Schiano to Sandusky's crimes was Mike McQueary's uncorroborated allegation from a 2015 deposition. In it, he said, without any concrete proof, that Schiano, who was an assistant at Penn State from 1990-95, had witnessed Sandusky assaulting a child in the shower.

Schiano has repeatedly denied it, and subsequent vetting by multiple employers have uncovered not a scrap of evidence to support McQueary's story. That included Tennessee, which nonetheless swiftly backed away from an agreement in principle with Schiano when its alumni began yowling about Penn State and Sandusky and the fact Schiano was there when it all went down.

Undoubtedly part of that was because Tennessee has its own issues in this area, having just settled a lawsuit brought by multiple women who claimed they had been sexually assaulted by Tennessee athletes, and that Tennessee officials hurriedly swept the alleged incidents under the rug. But part of it is also the stain that still clings to anyone who had any association with Penn State during the Sandusky years.

The mob mentality that rose up around Schiano as a result of that stain is both shameful and more than a little scary. Hysteria trumping due process, or at least the presumption of innocence, always is. But it's also abundantly clear Schiano was paying the price for the cavalier manner in which Penn State handled the Sandusky affair.

Fairly or not, its officials came off as more concerned about their football program and Joe Paterno's legacy than protecting children from a predator, and, long after Sandusky's crimes were exposed, some associated with the university continued to indicate they just didn't get it. That included a Penn State trustee who last spring wrote in an email to "The Chronicle of Higher Education" that he was "running out of sympathy" for Sandusky's victims.

 One can scarcely get more tone deaf than that, unless one currently lives in the White House. Or utter words with such lasting, haunting effect.

As both Schiano, and Tennessee, can indirectly attest.

Update: Reports now have Tennessee pursuing Purdue's Jeff  Brohm. Reverse Kiffin on the way?