CUTTING CORNERS.  Once upon a time, Bruce Pearl took a Wisconsin-Milwaukee basketball team to the national tournament, then parlayed it (despite denials at the time) into an appointment at Tennessee, where the men's team is not the best winter ticket on campus, that has now ended badly.  The separation bonus (golden parachute, if you will) he took might be a performance-bond-in-advance to the next basketball coach.

Labor Attorney David Burkhalter says a financial agreement like this one is not uncommon, and likely included several stipulations.  He speculated it might free both sides from being sued, and require Bruce Pearl to reveal any further NCAA violations and cooperate with any investigation.

"A prudent employer typically would want to have peace with the separating employee. You have to pay to get that, you have to pay consideration. You do not want to run the risk of being involved in litigation down the road, you want to have a smooth transition, you want to make sure that Coach Pearl fully cooperates with the university going forward. You want to make sure, again, that there's been a full disclosure of any and all violations, and that will be spelled out in the document," said Burkhalter.

Burkhalter also says what happens now could affect the basketball program in the future.   The next potential coach may look at how the university treated Pearl when he was let go before deciding to take the job.

Gregg Doyel of CBS Sports suggests that Bruce Pearl is collateral damage of Ohio State's tchotchkes for tattoos scandal, but the secondary explosions might yet take out Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel.

It took the Tressel fiasco for Tennessee to realize the NCAA was going to devastate its basketball program if Bruce Pearl were still the coach. Even with blindly loyal Volunteers fans gathering in support of their ethically bankrupt coach, Tennessee did the right thing on Monday by firing Pearl -- but don't give the school much credit. It did everything wrong, from start to finish, until stumbling onto the only resolution acceptable: firing a coach who would dare try to cover up NCAA violations.

Now the focus falls to Ohio State, and public perception will weigh heavily on the Buckeyes. For the second time, Tennessee has set the bar for responding to an ethically empty coach. The first time, Tennessee went for the in-season suspension. The SEC sat down Pearl for eight games, and that was good enough for Tennessee. And so it was good enough for Ohio State, which sat down its own ethically empty coach, Jim Tressel, for the first two games of the 2011 season.

Two games became five games after the Buckeyes gauged public perception, which bordered on ridicule, and accepted Tressel's offer to increase his own suspension. Which I don't believe for a second, by the way. Tressel lied to his own boss, but I'm supposed to believe he's telling the truth about his five-game suspension? Not gonna happen.

But now, here's what happened: Tennessee raised the bar from suspension to dismissal. Tennessee learned from Jim Tressel that its coach had to be fired.

To be continued ...  (There is a face-saving out for Ohio State.  A previous football coach was dismissed for failure to beat Wisconsin.)