Apparently intent on compounding its basketball hiring errors, Memphis is prepared to throw the ultimate hometown Hail Mary.

With Tubby Smith forced out Wednesday at great cost after an ill-conceived two-year tenure, Penny Hardaway appears to be next as coach of the Memphis Tigers. It would be a fascinating — and quite possibly foolhardy — gambit by one of America’s bedrock basketball schools. It would be an experiment that is simultaneously far outside the experience box and timidly tucked inside the parochialism box.

The 46-year-old Hardaway is a Memphis legend, a native son who has his jersey retired by the school. He was a standout NBA player for many years, an All-Star and Olympic gold medalist before injuries curtailed his career earlier this century. His celebrity has some shelf life, thanks to an enduring Nike shoe line and a memorable commercial series with a puppet version of himself.

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Can he coach a high-level college basketball team? None of the above biographical details suggests it, and none of the below, either.

Hardaway’s coaching experience consists of his current dominant run at Memphis East High School, where he puts a lineup of overwhelming Division I talent on the floor. Some of that talent is culled from the Team Penny AAU outfit Hardaway has bankrolled, including a pair of transfers who were ruled ineligible earlier this season by the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association but have since played after a temporary restraining order cleared the way.

In theory, Hardaway would bring all that East High talent to the university less than two miles away. That would be a start to rebuilding a program that has plummeted to its lowest point since the late 1990s. Sustaining it beyond the next couple of recruiting classes would be the hard part.

Currently, Hardaway is not exactly being forced to outscheme the competition, not the way a Memphis coach might need to against, say, Houston’s Kelvin Sampson, Wichita State’s Gregg Marshall and Cincinnati’s Mick Cronin. Maybe he could do that if the need arises, but Memphis would be entering into this agreement with zero idea about Hardaway’s true coaching chops.

View photos Penny Hardaway has zero college coaching experience. (AP) More

(As this Hardaway scheme gathered steam, an idea was floated that he might bring onboard Hall of Famer Larry Brown as an assistant in charge of actual coaching. While Brown is on the short list of best basketball coaches ever, he also is on the short list of the most crooked college coaches ever — three programs (UCLA, Kansas and SMU) three NCAA probations. Memphis has always been a bandit program itself, with its two most recent Final Four appearances vacated (1985 and 2008), but bringing in Larry Brown would be brazen even by bandit standards.)

A Hardaway hire would be Memphis again overreacting to the weaknesses of the last coach it didn’t like. Smith was hired as a reaction to the Josh Pastner era that yielded many recruiting successes but not enough on-court triumphs (a 2-4 NCAA tournament record in seven seasons). Tubby was the wise tactician type who would upgrade the actual coaching acumen that Memphians thought the young Pastner lacked.

But here’s what Memphis got: 64-year-old Tubby, not 50-year-old Tubby. The Tigers didn’t get the guy whose best work was between 1998-2005, when he won the ’98 national title and had overall No. 1 seeds in the 2003 and ’04 NCAA tourneys. They got the guy who, from 2006-16, never had an NCAA seed better than No. 8 and missed five Big Dances.

They got a Tubby Smith who led Memphis to its worst two seasons of the 21st century, ranking 101st in Ken Pomeroy’s ratings last season and a gruesome 160th this season. To compound that, Smith had made zero inroads on the rich local recruiting scene — the foundation upon which Memphis traditionally built its best teams.

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