If the FBI is right, and it's gone public with a case both comprehensive and compelling, Chuck Person is done as a basketball coach. He'll never work as an assistant again, let alone land the head coaching job he worked so desperately to find. One of the two greatest players in Auburn history will be fortunate to avoid jail time.
The FBI has charged Person with federal crimes, including bribery and corruption, allegedly for abusing the trust of players and their families for his own financial gain.
It appears the Rifleman is not who a lot of us thought he was.
Auburn is now part of an ongoing national college basketball scandal that could touch an untold number of players, coaches and schools before the digging is done. The sham of amateurism is on display again for the world to see.
Auburn basketball likely is headed for an NCAA investigation of massive proportion that could prove far more difficult to weather than that 13-month colonoscopy into the football program that resulted in no major charges.
How many scandals can happen on one man's watch before that man is relieved of his duties? For Auburn Athletics Director Jay Jacobs, this should be one scandal too many.
The time for regime change in the athletics department, starting with the man at the top of the organizational chart, is long overdue.
Jacobs must go.
Tuesday's national news putting Auburn in the worst possible light only added to the abundant anger of fans, boosters and trustees. That anger centers on the man whose job it is to put Auburn in the best possible light, a task at which Jacobs has failed time and time again.
The Person scandal isn't an exact parallel to the head coaching hires that have blown up in Jacobs' face in football (Gene Chizik), basketball (Tony Barbee), baseball (Sunny Golloway) and softball (Clint Meyers), a roster of failure that already should've sent the new school president in search of a new AD.
But federal charges against an associate head coach that should lead to an NCAA probe and could lead to severe sanctions against the basketball program call into question Bruce Pearl's leadership of that program heading into his fourth season on the Plains.
Person was much more than another assistant toiling in obscurity. He was Pearl's No. 2 in command. Person was the man primarily responsible for the sudden influx of talent into the long-suffering program, which included the first two five-star signees in program history.
Even if he had no clue of Person's alleged actions, Pearl now finds himself susceptible to the NCAA's relatively new head coach responsibility legislation.
Who hired Pearl, who arrived at Auburn while still under an NCAA show cause for mistakes he made that cost him the Tennessee job?
Jacobs.
To be clear, Person is the individual most responsible for his own actions. He's the one who allegedly took advantage of the trust players and their families placed in him to put money in his own pockets, and he allegedly did so without the slightest bit of due diligence into the financial adviser/FBI cooperating witness he was touting to them.
That said, the buck doesn't stop with Person. He's just the latest in a series of black eyes for Auburn Athletics. Pearl has questions of his own to address, but the biggest question continues to go unanswered.
How long will the president and the trustees allow their university's most public department to suffer under the watch of Jay Jacobs?