Bruce Pearl Needs To Cooperate

The fallout at Auburn's men's basketball team may be continuing to grow.

According to multiple sources that told ESPN, Auburn coach Bruce Pearl is in jeopardy of losing his job if he doesn't cooperate with the school's investigation into its basketball program.

Officials at Auburn recently retained a law firm to conduct an internal investigation into former Tigers associate head coach Chuck Person, who was arrested back on Sept. 26 as part of the FBI's probe into college basketball corruption. Person was recently indicated on six federal charges by a grand jury in New York.

Because Person is a coach on Bruce Pearl's staff, Pearl has been questioned multiple times on the corruption charges, but has refused to cooperate with the investigation into his program's involvement, which means either cooperate or lose your job.

There has been no deadline for Pearl to cooperate but assuming that he's not cooperating and Auburn officials get impatient, they will give him the boot, deadline or not, which tells me that Bruce Pearl better start cooperating if he intends to stay on.

Bruce Pearl is a former ESPN analyst and is set to enter his fourth season as Auburn's coach, but by Friday, he could very well be out of a job. His refusal to cooperate may have also stemmed from his penalties at Tennessee, when he was fired in 2011 after lying to NCAA investigators about the recruitment of prospect Aaron Craft, who ended up signing with Ohio State. He was given a three-year show case, which means no contact with recruits during that time.

While many have believed that Pearl learned from his mistakes and had a good program in Auburn during his time there, the latest with associate coach Chuck Person leads me, and possibly many others, to believe that he really didn't learn his lesson. Either that or he learned that talking wasn't a good thing for him, because the last time he talked about allegations like this, he lied.

Now, in terms of all this, Bruce Pearl better go cooperate, because he's going to get canned if he doesn't. Him not talking either tells me two things: He was in on this whole thing or he found silence is better than lying. Still, silence is very bad and especially when you refuse to cooperate in an investigation that involves your team.

I'll say this: If he doesn't cooperate by Friday, he's done at Auburn, because they're not going to stand for a guy who does something like this. They already look bad with the Person indictment and the last thing they need is a guy like Bruce Pearl refusing to cooperate. It's not good on both sides but it looks much worse on Pearl. You have to cooperate, no matter what.