All for Tennessee
Fansided

Austin Nichols Blocked from Going to Tennessee, Proving Memphis Head Coach Josh Pastner to be a Joke

By Caleb Calhoun

facebooktwitterreddit

Josh Pastner and the Memphis Tigers blocked Austin Nichols from transferring to the Tennessee Vols for reasons that prove once again he is a complete joke.

So let’s get this straight: Josh Pastner leads the charge to discontinue the series with the Tennessee Vols because he says it’s an unfair recruiting advantage.

That alone was the weirdest excuse ever. You think Marquette would make the same excuse to discontinue a series with Wisconsin? You think anybody would avoid playing Kansas in basketball because of a recruiting ground disadvantage?

Of course not.

More from Vols Basketball

But now it gets worse. As you may have recently heard, Austin Nichols, whom Tennessee recruited hard when Cuonzo Martin was in Knoxville, is transferring. The Tigers set conditions on his transfer.

Fair enough. The condition was that he could not transfer to a school that would be a future Memphis opponent, according to reports in Memphis. 

Guess who was on that report. Of course, the Tennessee Vols. The team that Pastner quit scheduling is now the team that he will consider a “future opponent” when blocking Nichols from transferring there.

In fact, according to CBS Sports columnist Gary Parrish, Memphis actually did send Tennessee an email claiming they were a future opponent.

Does anybody else not find this to be reflective of how the Memphis Tigers handle everything with Tennessee? If you are not going to play Tennessee in the future, and if you don’t consider it a rivalry anymore, then why do you care if he transfers there?

There are only three possible explanations.

The first would be Pastner and the athletic department plan to renew the basketball rivalry that was great for both teams and the sport as a whole. Not likely.

The second is the petty little-sister mentality of the school. Memphis has always felt second-tier to Tennessee, and in response to the football programs being on different wavelengths (the series is 22-1 in favor of Tennessee), they try to act like the basketball program is the reverse, even though Tennessee actually leads the basketball series overall.

But the third is the most plausible in this situation. Pastner is becoming more and more of a laughingstock and blocked this to not look like more of a joke. It is becoming evident he is a failure at the University of Memphis who schedules as easy as possible and sells great recruiting classes simply to keep his job without actually performing on the court.

He has yet to take the Tigers out of the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament despite these highly ranked recruiting classes, and half of the guys in these classes transfer out anyway.

As bad as he looks right now going into his seventh year, imagine how much worse it would be if he lost one of his prized recruits to Tennessee, a program so bad that it just hired its third head coach in as many years and fired the second of its past three coaches due to recruiting scandals.

Pastner already is a coach hanging by a thread. In reality, he is a complete joke who can do nothing but recruit. But through easy scheduling and a few years in a terrible conference in which he had a much more talented team all those years, he was able to fool everybody by racking up wins.

The funny thing of all this is that Tennessee still hangs over Memphis’s head, despite not having played them in either sport in three years. Pastner knows that and makes a fool of himself handling it.

And that is why, for no stated real reason whatsoever, he is blocking Nichols from going to Tennessee.

Next: Vols Recruiting Notes at Dead Period: Defensive End

More from All for Tennessee

Home/Vols Basketball