There's good news in Bruce Pearl's retirement as head basketball coach at Auburn, which is that he says he will not run for public office. The bad news is that Bruce Pearl says a lot of things, and does not have a history of trustworthiness. Had Bruce Pearl been a football coach, he could have kept the job and run for governor simultaneously, and the only person who could have stopped him would be Nick Saban. It is a fact that Pearl is a good basketball coach, and also that college sports is a rotten sort of meritocracy. He got work, and won, and got more prestigious work, and won, and continued to act exactly like Bruce Pearl the whole time.