Pearl Believes He'll Get Another Chance To Coach

Despite lying to NCAA investigators and being fired by the University of Tennessee following last season, former Volunteers basketball coach Bruce Pearl thinks he'll get another chance to coach again.

In an interview with 790 The Zone in Atlanta, Pearl said he must wait for the NCAA to rule on any punishment he could face, but he hopes another opportunity on the sidelines is in his future.

"I do think that I'm going to have the opportunity to coach again," Pearl said in the interview. "I've got to wait and see what the Committee on Infractions, what they say, probably coming up sometime in the middle of August and how quickly will they allow me to come back into coaching. That's going to go a long way towards whether or not I do coach again."

Pearl said his downfall at Tennessee came simply because he gave knowlingly false answers to two questions -- out of over 100 -- when NCAA investigators were looking into alleged violations at the school.

"In my visit with the enforcement staff, I answered about 150 questions," Pearl said. "I answered 148 of them honestly. There were two questions that I did not answer honestly. Had I answered those two questions knowingly, willingly, honestly, instead of a week later asking them to come back because I knew I had made a mistake … you guys would be interviewing the coach at Tennessee."

During the interview with 790 The Zone, Pearl was asked if he ever has moments where he asks himself, 'How did I get to this?'

"I'm still having them," Pearl responded. "Do you want me to write the book about how do you lose $10 million jobs? I can write the book. How can you be so dumb and so careless? … It's not so much about what we did, it's about how we handled it."

Ultimately, Pearl said that the feedback he has received from Tennessee fans has been a blessing and has kept him hopeful for another opportunity to get back in coaching.

"Even when Tennessee was considering letting me go at the end of the season, my approval rating was like 90 percent in a statewide poll," Pearl said. "I think it's because our fans have some appreciation for, I think, what we have done, the history of Tennessee basketball and the fact it had been a while since they had been successful. I think they appreciate some of the things we were trying to do in the community. The good outweighed the bad."

Pearl, who went before the NCAA's Committee on Infractions with Tennessee in June, said he thought the process was "fair."

"My impression of it right now is I got my day in court. My impression was they were genuinely, as a committee, very much interested in listening to what happened and, to the best of their ability, trying to determine what we did wrong ...," Pearl said. "We really had penalized ourselves tremendously. We had taken ourselves off the road. There were a lot of things we had done taking ourselves off the phone. I had been suspended eight games by Commissioner Slive. … And we lost our jobs on top of everything. The question, then, was, 'At what point does the crime fit the punishment?' That's what they're going to decide."

Thanks to Sports Radio Interviews for the transcript of the interview.