Bruce pearl is a great coach, but i dont think he is too concerned about pat summits name being on the court.
Not only is he not concerned about it, he's embraced it. He's the one who started this whole thing by painting his chest for a women's basketball game, after all.
For a couple of decades, the men's basketball program at UT has been in an awkward position. Not only is football #1 in Knoxville, but while the men's team has largely sucked, the women's team has won six national championships playing on the same floor. When the men were [1] medicore to bad, the comparisons were inevitable. I was a freshman when Summitt won her second title in 89, and people were already joking that the women could beat the men's team. Ha ha ha, but still -- you know that's got to be pressure on the whole men's program.
Pearl's found a way to make it a positive. With a combination of savvy marketing and good old fashioned school spirit, he's taken the winning tradition Summitt has forged and associated himself and his team with it. Instead of it being "the women have won six titles, but the men have won jack," he's made it about the whole school. And you can't pay for the kind of great publicity he's gotten the university in the last few months.
A friend of mine is a Michigan State alumna, and barely even a sports fan; I got an e-mail out of the blue from her yesterday. She wouldn't know whether our men's team was great or awful, but she knows who Pat Summitt is. (Olympics? osmosis? I don't know how she knows who Summitt is. I wouldn't have thought she knows how many points a field goal counts.) But somehow she'd seen footage of Summitt singing "Rocky Top," and she said that the whole scene, with "all the orange and everybody going crazy....well, I don't really even care about Tennessee at all (sorry), but the whole thing still gave me goosebumps."
You think Pearl is great for UT? And you think he cares about playing on a court with a woman's name on it?
[1] I am so happy to be able to use the past tense