Our friends at The Mag are previewing one high-profile school per day for their Summer Buzz series. For the sake of all that is synergistic, yours truly will be attempting the same, complementing each comprehensive Insider preview with some analytic fun. Today’s subject: Tennessee . When your program’s most successful basketball coach in history lies to NCAA investigators, a few things tend to happen: Your program becomes subject to wills of the NCAA Committee on Infractions. You fire that coach. (You might wait an entire season in the vain hope things work out. But eventually, yeah, you fire that coach.) You look for a new coach, one who doesn’t mind inheriting a post-sanctions quagmire. You hope that coach knows what he’s doing. By all accounts, Tennessee succeeded on the fourth count. Cuonzo Martin wasn’t hired only because he was one of the few rising college hoops coaches who still had his hand up when former coach Bruce Pearl, now a hot commodity on the D-League circuit, brought the Volunteers crashing down around him. Willingness is one thing, and Tennessee was probably just fine finding someone who actually wanted to come to Knoxville.* But willing and able? When you’re in UT’s situation, that’s another issue entirely. (*I remember reading a Tennessee fan forum post during the Vols’ coaching search. The discussion was centered on plausible coaching candidates, and at one point, a poster exclaimed that he expected the Vols to pursue Butler’s Brad Stevens and VCU’s Shaka Smart, among others. This was funny, but it was also kind of sad.) Considering the circumstances, Martin might have been the best possible hire. He has big-time recruiting experience in the Big Ten, a familiarity with high-major hoops, and his most recent coaching expedition, the one that earned him national buzz, saw him transform a struggling Missouri State program into a team that won the school’s first MVC regular-season title and at various times looked like an NCAA tournament at-large contender. That’s the able part. As for the willingness, well, Martin’s there. He wanted the job. And as has been written more than once in this space and others, the coach who grew up on the rough streets of East St. Louis and survived a mid-20s bout with cancer probably scoffs at the idea that rebuilding a major college hoops program constitutes “adversity.” When you think about it that way, it does seem sort of silly. Within the context of college basketball, though, Tennessee’s future is looking plenty adverse. For one, there’s the looming likelihood of NCAA sanctions. We’re not sure what the Committee on Infractions will eventually hand down to the Volunteers, but we do know that the men’s basketball and football programs are being investigated simultaneously, and the NCAA almost certainly has concerns about the school’s ability to, in the NCAA’s terms, foster an atmosphere of compliance. We also know that the NCAA is slowly but surely ramping up its penalties for violations; harsher penalties have been a cornerstone of new NCAA president Mark Emmert’s talking points on enforcement all the way through this week’s presidential retreat in Indianapolis . Neither bodes well for the Vols. The penalties are likely to be severe. Before the fall arrives, Martin may lose future scholarships. He may face recruiting restrictions. He might even be confronting the possibility of a postseason ban. I don’t need to page ESPN recruiting expert Dave Telep to confirm that these things are not exactly boons to recruiting. If the penalty is severe enough, it may be years before Martin can recruit with a full toolbox.

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Summer Buzz: Tennessee Volunteers