Tubby Smith resigns, taking Minnesota job

[BigSoonerFan]

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Breaking news: www.kentuckysportsradio.com and www.catspause.com reporting a deal is already in place to bring Billy Donovan to Kentucky, even as he is coaching in the Final Four.

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Not likely:
LEXINGTON, Ky. – A message-board post on a Web site devoted to covering University of Kentucky athletics caused a stir last night and this morning by reporting a rumor that UK was close to naming Florida’s Billy Donovan its head basketball coach.

Darrell Bird, the general manager of The Cats’ Pause – a magazine and Web site that covers UK sports – posted on the site’s message board a rumor that he’d been hearing about the impending hire of Donovan to replace Tubby Smith, who resigned last week.

The story was picked up by several other media outlets and attributed to The Cats’ Pause, but Bird said this morning that the post was intended only to update his site’s subscribers on the status of a rumor he was finding difficult to disprove.

“Somehow it went from a discussion on our subscriber-only message board to (being reported as) done-deal fact,” Bird said. “We talk about rumors every day on our message board.”

Bird posted a link to the message board thread from the site’s home page.

That link appeared under a headline: “Blockbuster deal done?” And Bird’s initial message-board post included several details, including rumors of a seven-year contract for Donovan that would pay him $3.5 million annually.

Bird wrote that the deal was “reportedly brokered Thursday and Friday during a meeting with Donovan’s agent in Lexington.”

That post also said that the news wasn’t coming from official sources such as UK athletics director Mitch Barnhart or university president Lee Todd. But Bird wrote that “if this were the Kentucky Derby we’d be close enough to smell the blanket of roses.”

Still, Bird said he didn’t intend the story to be treated as a news report. Instead, he said, his intent was to keep subscribers updated on the status of a rumor that already had made the rounds on the site’s message boards over the weekend.

Bird called the story “a solid rumor,” but said he wouldn’t have printed it in his weekly column in The Cats’ Pause.

He said he sees a distinction between posting a rumor on his site’s message board and reporting news on the site’s front page or in the printed edition of the magazine.

“To me, the message boards are almost like the radio call-in shows,” Bird said. “It’s, ‘What are you hearing?’ It’s a back-and-forth medium.”