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Is 'Hicksville' ready for Tubby's return?
Published: 3/21/2012 2:11 PM
Last Modified: 3/21/2012 2:11 PM

Folks in Minneapolis may think Tulsa is just down the street from "Hicksville," but news certainly travels slowly in the Twin Cities.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune blogged today about the rumor of Minnesota coach Tubby Smith's possible return to Tulsa. (Check out Michael Rand's blog here).

Smith, who got his head coaching start here in the early 1990s, has been on Tulsa fans' radar since before Doug Wojcik was removed as the Golden Hurricane's head coach.

Eric Bailey even mentioned Smith as a potential candidate for the job during our coverage of Wojcik's firing. (Check that out here).

But rumor and reality are often two different things. Bailey will have an update on all the Smith talk and other TU men's basketball coach search items in Thursday's paper.

If Smith is a serious candidate, it doesn't sound like some Minnesota fans are too broken up about it.

Don't believe me? You can follow @FireTubby on Twitter.

Smith's teams have won 20 or more games four times in the last five years but have only been to two NCAA Tournaments -- without a victory.

This year's team went 6-12 in the Big 10, but is still playing in the NIT (Minnesota faces Middle Tennessee on Wednesday night with the winner going to New York).

Based on little more than Tulsa's recent history, Smith's candidacy for the job strikes me as more fantasy than fact.

Smith would be wildly popular here, but he would go against Tulsa's current hiring trend -- local and inexpensive.

Smith's original contract with Minnesota was said to pay him somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.75 million per season -- or about a million or so more than Wojcik was thought to be making.

And you have to wonder if Smith, who is in his early 60s and less than a year removed from a battle with prostate cancer, would have the same drive as the first-year head coach who took Tulsa to back-to-back Sweet 16s.

But just having Smith's name associated with the job is good for Tulsa.

We now return you to our regularly scheduled cow-tipping competition... already in progress.

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The Editor's Desk

Tulsa World Sports Editor Michael Peters has nearly 20 years of daily newspaper experience. A 1993 graduate of Texas A&M, he worked at papers in Bryan-College Station, Texas, Beaumont, Texas, and Galveston, Texas, before joining the Houston Chronicle as High School Sports Editor in 2008. While in Houston, he coordinated coverage of the 2008 Texas Class 5A state football championships and the 2011 NCAA Men's Final Four.

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