There is one face, and voice, Texas Tech needs to see right now.
Coach Sharp, where are you? Texas Tech needs your presence, immediately.
Because the new mess in Lubbock is not all on the Texas Tech athletic director, Kirby Hocutt.
Marsha Sharp, and Texas Tech senior women's administrator Judi Henry, grab a broom, a mop, a nail gun, glue gun or duct tape, and help fix this.
These two are the ones who would have hand picked women's basketball coach Marlene Stollings to come to Lubbock in 2018. Hocutt would have signed off on it with minimal to zero hesitation.
Two years after the best season in the history of its athletic department, Texas Tech is now going through one of those periods of embarrassment, where coaches are fired and athletic directors sweat in meat lockers.
On Friday, Hocutt addressed the media one day after he fired Stollings. The firing followed an extensive report published by USA Today that outlined abusive behavior by Stollings and members of her staff.
Also fired was assistant coach Nikita Lowry Dawkins. Strength and conditioning coach Ralph Petrella, whose alleged behavior of potential sexual abuse toward players warrants criminal investigation, resigned in March.
If Hocutt should be fired for anything it's the fact that his department did not further explore Petrella's alleged behavior before he quit. Petrella has denied the allegations.
What's saving Hocutt is people like him _ and the success of the men's basketball team under Chris Beard and the baseball team under Tim Tadlock.
Marsha, it's game time.
Sharp is the former coach who led Tech to the national title with Sheryl Swoopes in 1993. She retired in 2006 and is listed as an associate athletic director and "head coach emerita" at Texas Tech.
A presence like that is a shadow over a program, and major decisions within it don't happen without her consent.
Sharp is one of the few women in college athletics whose presence shaped an entire department. She is among names such as the late Pat Summitt, Jody Conradt and C. Vivian Stringer.
Sharp did not respond to a request for an interview.
Of the head coaches at Texas Tech, two are female: women's golf and softball. One of the reasons Stollings was hired was because Tech did not need, or want, another man coaching one of their women's teams.
That would have fallen to the senior women's administrator, with Sharp's influence and approval.
Henry and Sharp both whiffed on the vetting process of a coach and her staff. Stollings has been in coaching since 2000, and a head coach since 2011. She would have been doing the same things at Tech that she did in her previous stops, at Minnesota, VCU and Winthrop.
Nikita Lowry Dawkins spent one year as Sharp's top assistant at Texas Tech, in 2006.
The priority of any Power 5 athletic director with its non-revenue sports is universal: You can lose some, but don't bleeping embarrass me. The Texas Tech women's basketball team is currently an embarrassment.
Some of the USA Today report reads like players whom Stollings inherited hated her, and did not see through her boring tactics, which were likely designed to run them off so she could assemble the roster with her own players.
Those transitions can be unpleasant, and typical of sports.
Some of the report reads like a coach who forgot that it's not 1956, and the bully methods that worked then are taboo now. Players are smarter, and their support systems enable, rather than challenge, them.
Some of the report reads like Sexism 101. If a men's basketball coach was accused of saying, and doing, some of the things allegedly done by Stollings, it would not have registered.
But 12 of her 21 players leaving is a high number, even in this age of everyone transferring for playing time elsewhere.
Hocutt took the questions, and the blame. As the AD who makes big money, he understands this is part of the job. At least during his time with the media, he did not sound sure if he was going to last.
College athletic departments are in hell right now, and changing an AD during a global pandemic in the face of crushing financial losses is unlikely.
While Stollings is technically his hire, it didn't happen without Henry and Sharp.
Along with Sheryl Swoopes, Marsha Sharp is one of the women who helped to build the Texas Tech athletic department.
She should help repair it.
