April 14
All the speculation around Kansas coach Roy Williams and the North Carolina coaching vacancy continues to swirl. The soap opera involving the Tar Heels replacement for Matt Doherty should play out in the next few days.

Here are two possible scenarios.

The first scenario is that Williams did not want to accept the position from North Carolina prior to attending the John Wooden Award ceremony with Jayhawks star Nick Collison on Saturday in Los Angeles.

	Roy Williams took the Jayhawks to four Final Fours.

Williams, a former assistant to legendary UNC coach Dean Smith, also received the John Wooden Legends of Coaching Award on Saturday. He was obviously on Cloud Nine upon receiving this prestigious award. The incredible list of previous winners includes Duke's Mike Krzyzewski and Arizona's Lute Olson.

Anytime you get a trophy with Coach Wooden's name on it, you know it's special.

Some believe that Williams wouldn't have felt comfortable at the event -- with a number of Kansas administrators, friends and Collison -- if he had already accepted the Carolina job.

So out of respect, this theory goes, he put off North Carolina athletic director Dick Baddour until the ceremonies were completed.

There's no doubt that Williams is the first choice in Chapel Hill. Any talk about other candidates is simply window dressing. The man the Tar Heels want is Williams; just check out his 15-year record at Kansas -- 418 wins and four Final Fours -- or his 10 seasons as an assistant at North Carolina under Smith.

On Monday, does he call a team meeting at Kansas and tell his players of his decision to leave? Does he call his recruits and tell them he's leaving Lawrence? Williams' recruiting class is rated as one of the top five in America. Does he return to his roots? He's from Asheville, North Carolina.

Then there's the second scenario. He returns from the West Coast, and all his love, feeling and loyalty for so many people in Kansas gets the best of him and he decides to stay put. That's what happened three years ago before Carolina wound up hiring Doherty, and it won't be easy to call a bunch of kids he recruited hard to wear the Kansas uniform and tell them he won't be their coach.

When McDonald's All-American David Padgett committed to Kansas, he said his second choice was North Carolina, and that Williams was the reason he chose the Jayhawks. How do you call that youngster you won't be part of his life when you made that commitment and he did the same.

I've said many times that if a coach moves on to take another position, a recruit should be able to go elsewhere. If the new coach can re-recruit him and convince him to stay, that's fine. But if the recruit is uncomfortable with the new coach, he should be allowed to go anywhere except to the school that hired the former coach away from that institution (to avoid package deals). The player couldn't follow the original coach, and he shouldn't lose a year waiting.

If a coach moves on to take another position, a recruit should be able to go elsewhere.

Under current NCAA rules, if Williams left Kansas, those four recruits would have to sit out a year if they transferred (though they could still play for four years). It's sad, because coaches move on to new deals, country club setups, and all sorts of goodies. But the player gets penalized -- and someone has to explain how that's fair.

At Wake Forest, coach Skip Prosser found it difficult to say yes to Pittsburgh after meeting with the Demon Deacon players. He stayed in the ACC and said "no" to the Panthers. The Wake players made it clear they wanted him to stay. That's also the message to Williams out of Lawrence from returning players like Keith Langford, Aaron Miles, Wayne Simien and Jeff Graves.

So which scenario will win out? Is Williams going to North Carolina or staying in Kansas?

Williams is emotional and caring, a loyal guy who is torn between two of the marquee programs in the sport. Does he go back to Dean Smith and Tar Heel blue, or does he stay with Rock, Chalk, Jayhawk? We should know sometime this week.