Is Dana Altman Leaving The Hogs At The Altar?

FoxSports.com is reporting that former Creighton and soon to be Arkansas head basketball coach Dana Altman is now "pulling a Bobby Cremins" and returning to Creighton, leaving Arkansas yet again without a men's basketball coach. Fox Sports is citing "a pair of industry sources" in their story, and if this is true it's just another bizarre twist in what has been already been one of the stranger offseasons in recent college sports history for both the basketball and football programs at Arkansas.

Altman was supposedly coming to Arkansas with his entire coaching staff and the Creighton Athletic Director (who would have been his Director of Basketball Operations and evident heir to Frank Broyles as the AD at Arkansas), which was alone was a very strange hiring process. Combine that with the earlier public whiffs on Billie Gillispie, Calipari and Bill Self and the firing of a coach who had been to back to back NCAA tournaments without having a superior replacement already lined up, and this hasn't been a hiring process you'll see in any future "how to" guides for running an athletic department. Now you have the 3rd or 4th choice leaving you at the altar and returning to a mid-major? Talk about a public relations disaster for Arkansas.

Much like North Carolina State last year, Arkansas is discovering that recent performance matters much more than old banners hanging in the rafters when coaches are looking at potential destinations, and that there's only a handful of schools in the country who can just open their head coaching jobs up and pick and choose who they want. Like North Carolina State, Arkansas is a good job. It's not a great job, and it's obviously not as good as the fans seem to believe it is (you'll see Arkansas fans say it's a "top 10 job" - well, obviously the coaching community doesn't feel the same way). It shouldn't have come to this though, it's becoming more and more apparent that the Arkansas Athletic Department is just a mess - this hiring process is just yet another part of a laundry list of mishandled and mismanaged events in recent years in Fayetteville.