North Carolina A.D. Dick Baddour allowed Matt Doherty to resign as Tar Heel basketball coach after hearing from various players under Doherty and their parents. Some folks wondered if "the inmates were running the asylum" now.

	Who's wearing the pants in this picture?

I don't know about all that. I do know, having learned it from a Mr. Ken Kesey, who once worked in an actual insane asylum in Menlo Park, Calif., that at times it might go better if the inmates did run the asylum, if the alternative is the sadistic Nurse Mildred Ratched.

Was Matt Doherty the hoop equivalent of Nurse Ratched?

Enough "inmates" said, "No question about it," and thought -- no, knew -- he was precisely that. She was just doing her job, too. As she saw it. The parents of the ball-playing "inmates" too were unanimous in their skepticism about the future of their sons at UNC. Now, you ever seen the campus of UNC? Gorgeous. Who would transfer from such a place, unless they found themselves in a loony bin at practice?

When coach Doherty tauntingly bounced a basketball off Joe Forte's head a couple years ago, and that story began making the quiet rounds in all basketball, that was plenty asylum enough for Joe Forte (who would have been a senior this year, and quite an effective one, and better off as a man, like his high school teammate, Keith Bogans) and his mother. Forte promptly escaped The Asylum Formerly Known as the University of North Carolina, prematurely, according to his skill/maturity level, going to the NBA.

	Forte could have used more than two years at the Asylum.

Joe Forte could have used a little more North Carolina in him. In his game and life. As instructed by Dean Smith, or Frank McGuire before that. Or by Matt Doherty, 10 years from now, after he has learned what the hell he's doing. He got the Carolina job after a year rah-rahing Notre Dame to the NIT. Now Joe Forte sings in the shower after losses, gets into fights with his Seattle teammates, defines blase.

So what, you say? You gotta crack some heads among the inmates in the asylum sometimes? You got a business to run here? Some times you got a kick some butts to make it run right? Well then, if that's the case, you sound like Nurse Ratched, too, or maybe former Vegas hotelier Moe Green, and not a college basketball coach. Verbal, emotional and physical abuse seems like something Bobby Knight could get away with, but even that was way back, once upon a time in Indiana. Knight has also proven he not only can coach basketball, he can also graduate basketball players. Matt Doherty had done none of that. He should have been walking softly and carrying Dean Smith on speed-dial.

Bobby Knight and his demeanor once had come to define Indiana basketball. If you bit, if you went there, you knew you might get slapped around a bit, especially emotionally. But you would learn basketball as well. And what's more, you would probably graduate from Indiana University.

	If the diplomatic demeanor of Dean Smith isn't good enough for you, nothing is.

So, fair enough.

Conversely, Dean Smith's demeanor came to identify Carolina basketball. It was a calm, thoughtful, teacherly demeanor. Some people said Smith wasn't fiery enough, at first, but he knew the hell out of basketball, and eventually his free-flowing and sanitary teams played a beautiful game of hoop, as Kansas under Roy Williams, Smith's former assistant, does now. Carolina advanced to 11 Final Fours and won two national titles, and Smith also graduated a lot of young men, those who didn't leave early for the NBA, and that's why they name nice buildings after you, even if those buildings eventually house what some people think are 18-, 19- and 20-year-old lunatics, and their idiot families, and it becomes the Dean Dome Asylum, which, I don't know, just guessing, must be disappointing if you're Dean Smith.

From reading Ken Kesey, you see even inmates have dignity, and respond to respect and expectations. Even inmates in an asylum don't deserve humiliation -- not if you want a free-flowing and sanitary asylum. And even young people don't deserve unfettered abuse. Not all the time.

Spare the rod and spoil the child, sure, but bandage 'em up later. Be responsible for them. Bear their weight. Don't dog them out so quick, like they are the problem, when six months ago you were begging them to help you, telling them how great they were in order to get them to come to your school so your rep would be enhanced and you could make yourself rich and famous. Don't be that obvious.

Personally, I liked the "Cuckoo's Nest" starters of Danny DeVito as Martini, Brad Dourif as Billy Bibbit, Christopher Lloyd as Taber, Will Sampson as Chief; sure, they were a bit nuts, kind of off, but they responded to things like being taught new experiences and methods, having expectations put on them, and then being forgiven and lined up again when, of course, they could not meet those expectations as mere neophytes at basketball, fishing, women, whatever.

It's called teaching.

I particularly liked asylum inmate Will Sampson as Chief Bromden and Jack Nicholson as Randle Patrick McMurphy (in the UNC situation, I think maybe it's Rashad McCants who's Nicholson's McMurphy). Even though the book was told from Bromden's point of view, in the film, one of his moments is, interestingly enough, when Murphy coaxes some basketball and some innate dignity out of him on the playground.

If you see that scene, you can't help but smile. You smile because it's feel-good. You smile because it's true. You smile unless you're Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched.

Then you don't smile. Deep down, you hate them all.

Matt Doherty didn't cause a lot of smiles at Carolina.

Word was, Dean Smith wouldn't have much to do with Doherty -- not as a young basketball coach trying to bully and bluff his way through the tough early times that Smith and Wooden and many young coach/teachers go through.

	Matt Doherty didn't cause a lot of smiles at Carolina.

Doherty might learn from this, learn how to handle young men and his own feelings about himself (he said he was "slow and couldn't jump" as a player, as if those were reasons for acting up as a coach), learn to coach. After all, he is a competitor, he can grow, he is worthy, in fact, he started on the same court with Worthy, and Jordan, and Perkins, Jimmy Black, Patrick Ewing, Sleepy Floyd and Fred Brown in that fascinating 1982 NCAA title game at the Superdome, so maybe, just maybe, he wasn't quite as slow or as horrible as he recalls himself being, as he was brooding about players he recruited playing inadequately as he was throwing chairs and basketballs about.

His teaching techniques obviously leave a lot to be desired at this point. Even just as a coach and not a teacher, sad though that description is, there's more to it than simple motivation. He's still a young man -- maybe his temper and style will change. Maybe it won't. Time will tell.

We'll never know everything that went on; Doherty said to Jay Bilas he once threw around a rack of chairs, trying to get the players' attention, motivate them, instill ... what? Fear? Who looked like the inmate in this asylum while he was doing that, I wondered, as the student-athletes were out on the floor, wondering what the heck was going on under the stands with old Nutbird? Who's the lunatic in this picture, I wonder? (Gotta love art, gotta love Ken Kesey.)

In Doherty's resignation, or in his outgoing interview with Jay Bilas, there was no mention of a ball being bounced off Joe Forte's head, or any of the other personal humiliations players and parents revealed to Dick Baddour.

Although Baddour is getting some bad press, he didn't spill those beans. It would not be wrong for Doherty to land on his feet somewhere, and Baddour will help him.

So, when tempted to talk Mike Ditka-tough about inmates running asylums, and relating to Matt Doherty's side of it, because he's got grey hair, think about this: When did UNC become an asylum? The Portland Trail Blazers, there's an asylum for you, but when did UNC become one? I thought it was a great school, a place I'd have happily sent my son, a seat of higher learning, beautiful campus, blue heaven ...

Asylum?

College basketball can be an asylum. But Carolina ...?

What is the world coming to, when 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds (and their parents -- how dare they care what happens?) can dictate whether a college coach stays or goes? Well, really, if you look at it, that's always been and should be the case.

When Ohio State's Woody Hayes punched Clemson linebacker Charlie Bauman on the sideline for taunting during a Gator Bowl game, instead of showing him the error of his ways by some other method ... that dictated it was time for Woody, far more of a coaching legend than Matt Doherty, to go. When Bobby Knight was videotaped choking Neal Reed, Bobby had to relocate to Texas Tech.

After all, it's the power of the 18-, 19- and 20-years-olds -- the "inmates" -- that makes a coach a 70 percent winner, which is what it takes to please alumni, boosters and student bodies at a Carolina, an Indiana, a UCLA, a Kansas. No problemo, at those schools, you can attract the kind of "inmates" (read horsepower) to get that done. It is the horsepower of those 18-, 19- and 20-year-olds that gets a coach to the Final Four, or even the Sweet Sixteen, enables him to have his million-dollar job.

I know there's a new matrix ... early entry into the NBA has given some of these knuckleheads a false sense of entitlement. In that case, let them transfer. Encourage it. Do what Tubby Smith did, go with lesser talents who can absorb good coaching, and still win. You don't hear about Jim Boeheim bouncing a ball off of Carmelo Anthony's head, do you? No. You are never too young to get some measure of respect, especially from the person whose job depends on your performance. The least a college coach can do is pick you up and dust you off after he has verbally knocked you down. The least a college coach can do is try to teach you properly how to play, compete and live with a measure of grace. In fact, that, not winning, is his real job. That's the job within the job, the job on top of the job.

That's the true mastery of it.

Maybe next time Matt Doherty will try it that way first.

Ralph Wiley spent nine years at Sports Illustrated and wrote 28 cover stories on celebrity athletes. He is the author of several books, including "Best Seat in the House," with Spike Lee, "Born to Play: The Eric Davis Story," and "Serenity, A Boxing Memoir."