Bay Area coaching soap opera worth staying up for

But no, instead both schools are in a mess, Stanford far worse, because the left index finger doesn't know what the right nostril is doing. It's a coach going to a rival school, which is entertainment, the school he used to coach losing its coach, and the search buzz that surrounded the one transferring itself to the other, with many of the same names as candidates. What could be more good-natured family fun?

Instead, it's a public relations staph infection all around. The one school's athletic director comes off as either glacially slow, disingenuous, weak, cheap or maybe all of the above. The other school's coach, stuck momentarily behind a rock and a hard place, decides to try and hide in the bushes instead of coming out in the open and saying, "I'm not stuck at all! I'm happy as hell!"

And both schools' fans get to see character flaws instead of character and their heroes in clumsy, bumbling, stammering fashion. It's a schadenfreude Mardi Gras, and you're all invited.

And that is an event that transcends geography, the curvature of the earth, the laws of time and space, and even the 24/7 news cycle. It's the best kind of mess -- the kind that never had to be, and if we can't stretch this out until Draft Day, then we haven't done our jobs. It is, after all, the universal Third Law Of Media Relations in action -– you screw up, we line up.

Anyway, we hope you enjoyed our little play, as we have gone to such weird machinations to present it to you. And hey, maybe Stanford will hire someone so bizarre that you'll want to come back for that, too.

Bob Knight from Bristol? Nahhh. None of us lives that well.

Ray Ratto is a columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle.