Now? Indiana wants Sampson as coach now?

So now Sampson takes his NCAA-singed backside to Bloomington, and all of Hoosier Nation can spend the next 3 1/2 weeks holding its breath, waiting for that Committee on Infractions meeting in Utah.

If you want to believe in the best possible scenario for Indiana and Sampson, believe this: Indiana, which is located less than an hour from NCAA headquarters in Indianapolis, didn't hire Sampson without calling someone at the NCAA for assurances that Sampson wouldn't be dragged too deeply through the mud on April 21. Maybe someone at Indiana spoke with NCAA president Myles Brand, the former Indiana president.

Not sure if that's the case, but for Indiana's sake, it had better be. Otherwise, Indiana has just handed one of the prime pieces of coaching real estate to someone who might have a terrible credit report.

As for Oklahoma's next move ... it's not pretty.

Sampson's coaching tree is bleak, and the Oklahoma job isn't exactly considered a plum among college coaches.

It's a football school for one thing, and even if it were a basketball school, it might be a women's basketball school. Throw in the NCAA investigation -- again, potential penalties such as additional scholarship reductions and a postseason ban won't be known for weeks -- and this job is not going to pique the interest of established coaches at big-time programs.

If Oklahoma wants to make a painless transition from Sampson's staff to the next one, it would promote assistant coach Bob Hoffman. Hoffman is connected to Sampson, which is bad, but the NCAA didn't find him culpable in the phone-call scandal -- which is good.

Hoffman, 48, won big at NAIA Oklahoma Baptist and held his own at Division I Texas-Pan American, and while this sentence doesn't make him a sure-thing hire, he does have the state connections and the relationships with current players and incoming recruits that the Sooners will need.

Another likely candidate is Missouri State coach Barry Hinson, an Oklahoma native and former Oral Roberts head coach. Hinson is close with former Oklahoma governor and current OU president David Boren, for whom Hinson campaigned 20 years ago when Boren was a U.S. senator.