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Blog by local sportscaster:

Man, oh man.

Coaching searches have always been crazy, but the current search for a men's basketball coach at Louisiana just gets crazier by the minute, if you believe what you're hearing and reading.

We've been working hard trying to separate the fact from the fiction. Here's what our sources are telling us.

Former UL and LSU assistant Butch Pierre, currently at Oklahoma State, did in fact, interview over the weekend. My sources tell me that Pierre's interview went well and he definitely remains a candidate. You can't call Butch the frontrunner, since Athletic Director David Walker and Sr. Associate AD Scott Farmer have said they would like to have someone with head coaching experience. While Pierre has ten games of experience as an interim at LSU after the firing of John Brady, he is the least experienced of the candidates in running his own program. Pierre is making awfully good money as the top assistant to Travis Ford and might have to take a pay cut to be the head coach at UL. But Pierre has never backed off from his desire to be the head coach of the Cajuns. And I believe that if he's the choice, he'll come in a heartbeat.

There was a report yesterday that Murray State head coach Billy Kennedy was "out" as a candidate for the job. With Kennedy's Racers set to open NCAA play against Vanderbilt, Kennedy certainly doesn't want the distraction. But Kennedy's interest in the job remains, according to my sources. He knows that, this year not withstanding, the Sun Belt is a much better basketball league than the OVC and it might be tougher to win here than it is at Murray State. If it gets that far, that might be a concern. You can expect Murray State to sweeten Kennedy's deal at the end of the season. But whatever they pay him, the Cajuns can probably beat it. Lots of rumors concerning Kennedy and a couple of high profile jobs, but we're hearing that, in some cases, he isn't interested and in other cases, the school is going in a different direction.