Welcome to a new series where we break down the potential candidates to replace Dave Leitao as head coach of the Virginia men's basketball team.
I thought we might as well start with the most popular name and the potential pipe-dream that is keeping Wahoo Nation up at night.
Tubby Smith may currently have a job at the University of Minnesota, but everybody seems to think that this is the main target on Athletic Director Craig Littlepage's list.
Don't believe me?
How about the Washington Post, the Richmond Times Dispatch, or the Daily Progress, among others?
In 2005, it was rumored that Tubby Smith was the No. 1 target and The Roanoke Times lead UVA beat writer Doug Doughty reported two years ago that an offer was in place before it may have been nixed by University President John Casteen.
Casteen basically seemed unwilling to justify a nearly $3 million annual salary for a basketball coach.
Could he have really changed his tune four years later, in this economic downtime?
Will Littlepage get his first choice the second time around?
WHY TUBBY WILL JOIN UVA
Tubby Smith may have grown accustomed to the freezing temperatures of a Minnesota winter, but his heart remains in Virginia.
Smith has a great deal of family and friends in Virginia, and he even got his start in coaching as an assistant at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Smith's wife is originally from the area and Minnesota fans know that UVA is one of the two or three schools where Smith might actually listen to all these alluring overtures.
It is an area Smith knows well and an area he certainly would be able to recruit with the best of them.
In fact, Smith is one of the few guys out there who could go toe-to-toe with Coach K and Roy Williams for some of the hotshot recruits of the Mid-Atlantic area.
While Minnesota is a major program with quite a bit of basketball history itself, Virginia simply has better facilities, with a $131 million arena, and still has enough money left to give Smith a major pay raise.
Minnesota will certainly try its best to match whatever offer Virginia puts forward, but it seems clear that if the Cavaliers are willing to put up numbers around $2.75 million to $3 million (the same numbers talked about in 2005), it might just be an offer Smith would be unable to refuse.
The Cavaliers have taken a strong stance by firing Leitao so quickly, particularly when you consider many thought he was going to get another year to turn things around.
Sure, Virginia had its worst season in over three decades, but the team was extremely young and appeared to be making strides by winning three of its four conference games after Valentine's Day.
Leitao was the 2007 ACC Coach of the Year, for goodness sake.
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