Tennessee head basketball coach Bruce Pearl ratted out all 31 teams on the Volunteers’ side of the NCAA Tournament bracket today, a bold step he hopes will ease his team’s path to championship game April 3^rd in Indianapolis.

            “Our first game is Thursday afternoon against Winthrop,” said Pearl, “but if everything goes to plan, we’ll win by forfeit because they won’t even show up due to being suspended by the NCAA.”

            Pearl sent NCAA president Myles Brand an e-mail this morning detailing “grievous violations” committed by every team in the Washington, D.C. and Minneapolis regions, from boosters giving recruits money to more outlandish claims, such as players being given gifts of unicorns and magical flying carpets.

            “Admittedly, some of the claims in my report are a bit absurd,” said Pearl, “but it was hard to make up 31 different fictional charges, so I started to run out of ideas by the end. Hopefully the NCAA will buy it all. But even if not, I’m hoping that by the time they realize everything is a bunch of bull, all of the teams will have been suspended and we’ll be playing in the national championship game.”

            Pearl, of course, has a proud history of being a rat. As an assistant coach at Iowa in 1989 he lost out on a prized recruit to Illinois and proceeded to try to get the Illinois program busted on recruiting charges – going as far as to secretly record phone conversations with the recruit – but the allegations were never upheld.

            “When I fail at something it’s my natural instinct to whine and cry and blame other people and make stuff up to protect my self,” said Pearl. “That’s just how I operate. And now I’m in charge of the most undeserving, if not the worst, No. 2 seed in NCAA Tournament history. We have no possible chance of success in this tournament by playing it straight. So that’s why I’m reverting to old form and trying to help myself out by ratting on other people. It’s the only shot I’ve got.”

            Pearl urged Brand and the NCAA to act quickly in suspending the teams on Tennessee’s side of the bracket: “don’t reward these cheaters by allowing them to participate in the NCAA Tournament,” wrote Pearl. “Act swiftly by suspending them all and send a strong message that cheating will not be tolerated in college basketball.”

            “Usually our investigations into possible violations take a year or more to conduct,” said Brand. “But these allegations are so egregious that I may need to suspend them all right away. For instance, Pearl not only claims that the No. 3 team in his bracket, North Carolina, requires its players to practice cannibalism, but that the No. 1 seed, UConn, allows its players to steal laptops and that the players on the No. 1 seed in Minneapolis, Villanova, steal pre-paid phone cards. I hope this stuff isn’t true, but Bruce Pearl has always struck me as a sincere person, so I’m going to have to take his word for it.”