In the shady, dirty world of college sports, there are all sorts of go-betweens and representatives and relationship-builders and the like. Most of these people hover around and soak up all the money in college athletics that is, theoretically, not supposed to be going to players. It’s a dirty, filthy business, but so is blogging, and you don’t see me complaining, do you?

Among these go-betweens are coaching firms, places that act both on behalf of coaches — lobbying for paying coaches to get them into consideration at big jobs — and for universities, acting as mini-search committees for the schools. Sometimes these firms help a lot. After all, being an athletic director is hard work. Having to know all these guys’ names and phone numbers, I mean, gosh. That can get confusing. Which is where the search firms come in. They make life on the golf course even more stress-free.

As Brooks points out, they also occasionally make a boo-boo … and don’t clean the results off their Web sites quite fast enough:

Afternoon host Darren Smith pointed out, apparently from a piece today in the SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE, that the school had hired a search firm to help identify candidates for the *plum* position.  He then noted that the company, called Parker Executive Search, had a website that listed some of the coaches and schools the firm as connected.

One of those wonderful marriages arranged (and duly noted) by PES? Kelvin Sampson and Indiana. When I got home I looked up the site, the cellphone bandit was already wiped off the company’s live site. But Sampson’s Hoosier hire is mentioned on another page of the company’s web address, from a piece on PES taken from Rivals.com. Oops.

This firm actually did its job in Sampson’s case, because he wasn’t in even consideration throughout the process, but thanks to Parker Executive Search, got his name in the picture and later impressed the higher-ups enough to get the job. Which is what a search rep firm is supposed to do. But it doesn’t make the Sampson hire any better for either side.

The question is better asked: Did PES get Sampson that gig in Milwaukee? Because that looks pretty kush.