Welcome to the Sports Sideshow. A place to make fun of athletes missing an open net goal, Craig Counsell’s 0-for-6,584 streak and Raider’s owner Al Davis being a walking corpse.

For this week’s soiree, we focus on former Tennessee and Wisconsin-Milwaukee men’s basketball coach — and body paint enthusiast — Bruce Pearl. Last year he was caught cheating by the NCAA when he hosted a picnic for two recruits. To make matters worse, he lied to investigators about it. Big mistake.

He was fired from Tennessee after the season and given a three-year ban by the NCAA. Instead of taking his talents to the NBA, as most college coaches caught cheating tend to do (I see you Kelvin Sampson), he went rogue.

Ladies and gentleman meet your 2011-2012 vice president of marketing . . . at H.T. Hackney, a wholesale grocery distributing company in Knoxville, Tenn.

He will no longer be the big cheese with national TV appearances. Instead, he will be a small fry in the freezer aisle of your local grocery store.  It’s not all bad for Pearl though: that orange body paint he liked to wear may come in handy one day. Rumor has it Hackney’s is in the market for a new carrot mascot.