re: NCAA Tournament Wins by Team- Past 25 seasons

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I'm too young to know anything about Nolan. What's the back story on his termination?

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The relatively unbiased opinion is that Frank Broyles was a genius at being an athletic director. His facility building program was amazing, especially at a school with a small population that wasn't insanely interested in sports. He saved Arkansas from being left behind when the SWC imploded and kept us from being stuck in Conference USA or worse. And he had a tremendous knack for finding great coaches.

And... like a lot of geniuses he had some bad stuff to. One of which is he was a terrible micromanager. Mostly this was football related. Broyles ran off some great coaches from Arkansas on the gridiron. But it also drifted over to basketball.

Enter Nolan Richardson, an incredibly gifted and intelligent basketball coach, who was extremely opinionated and willing to speak his mind. Naturally, the two hated one another. They clashed repeatedly for years, even while Arkansas was enjoying amazing success. Broyles wanted a coach that was, how to put this, not so out spoken. Richardson wanted to piss on Broyle's grave and got a real case of the red arse that the mediocre Houston Nutt was making more money than he was.

When Nolan made some remarks with racist leanings about how fans viewed him Broyles couldn't wait to jump on that. Things got very heated, Nolan got fired, and Arkansas wandered the desert of college basketball for a long while.

They made up. Folks tend to do that. I think Broyles, towards the end of his life, realized that his micromanaging hurt the programs he really loved more than helped them. I think Nolan, as he nears the end of his life, realized that he truly loves NW Arkansas and that he can't do serious jail time for pissing on Broyle's grave at this point in his life.

Frank Broyles is both the greatest and worst thing to happen to Arkansas sports. But you know what? We'd be in the Big 12 (at best) if we hadn't moved him to AD.