The Tennessee-Mike Gundy romance came to an abrupt end Tuesday night, sources confirmed to Yahoo Sports.

Was it due to a new Big Orange backlash?

More internet outrage aimed at the next candidate to become the football coach of the Volunteers?

Another populist uprising, this one decrying Gundy’s supportive stance toward someone he recruited and coached at Oklahoma State who was accused and ultimately convicted of sexual assault?

No. You didn’t hear the backlash. You didn’t see the internet outrage. You didn’t experience the uprising. None of that happened.

It’s fair to wonder why. It’s fair to wonder why the explosive details of Chris Collins’ career at Oklahoma State didn’t become an incendiary issue Tuesday — to wonder about the dramatic difference between the angry Greg Schiano populist revolt in Knoxville on Sunday and the giddy Mike Gundy revival two days later.

Other than career winning percentage, of course. Schiano’s is .504 as a college head coach, Gundy’s .681. That’s a big difference to keep in mind when considering the vastly different treatment the two received.

Tennessee fans reacted with unprecedented force and fury Sunday to the news that their school was in the process of hiring Schiano as the next football coach of the Volunteers. They drove the Ohio State defensive coordinator out of town before he even got to town.

Tennessee turned its eyes to Oklahoma State’s Mike Gundy after the Greg Schiano fiasco on Sunday. (Getty) More

In the end, the deal-breaking rallying cry from the fans was this: We want a coach without a whiff of scandalous baggage. The baggage they assigned Schiano came from a hearsay allegation in a 2015 deposition of former Penn State assistant coach Mike McQueary, wherein McQueary said he heard that Schiano had information about convicted pedophile Jerry Sandusky behaving improperly with children when they were on staff together in the 1990s.

That allegation was never proven, and no charges were brought against Schiano. He was never sued in civil court. The attorney general who vigorously investigated the Sandusky scandal never went after Schiano. Ohio State vetted the available information thoroughly when the allegation arose in 2016 and found it to be unsubstantiated.

Despite all that, the snippet of McQueary testimony was ignited into the firebrand of righteousness that Tennessee fans used to blow up the hiring of a football coach and emasculate the school’s athletic director. For some, the indignation may have been sincere.

But for others, the Sandusky association became a convenient cover for rebelling against a coach with a middling career record. It’s quite easy to suspect that a lot of people smeared Schiano’s name and reputation and then shrugged it off as collateral damage in the frenzied search for a winning coach who can drag the program out of a decade-long doldrums.

But let’s take Tennessee fans at their word. They say they don’t want a coach with even a hint of tolerance for sexual assault? Then why didn’t they have anything to say about Collins’ time playing for Gundy at Oklahoma State?

On Nov. 6, 2007, three days after playing for Oklahoma State in a 38-35 loss to Texas, Collins pleaded guilty to a charge of aggravated sexual assault of a child. He admitted to having sex with a 12-year-old girl in 2004, when he was 17. A day later he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison, though the jury recommended he serve probation instead.

Collins said he was told the girl was 16 years old at the time of two consensual sexual encounters in his hometown of Texarkana, Texas. The girl denied telling Collins that.

Because of the charge against him, Collins sat out his senior year of football at Texas High School in Texarkana. A scholarship offer from the University of Texas was rescinded. Despite all that, new Oklahoma State head coach Mike Gundy gave Collins a scholarship and he played as a true freshman for the Cowboys.

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