If God has a prevailing interest in college basketball to go along with His (or Her) sense of humor, He (or She) must be bent over double these days.

I mean, St. Bonaventure was a touch of mischievous genius -- the university president as the FIRST firing rather than the last one has a perverse sense of justice to it.

But the idea that Jim Harrick would be fired at Georgia before Steve Lavin would be fired at UCLA -- downright diabolical, I tell you.

	Steve Lavin

	Jim Harrick

Harrick was suspended Monday afternoon under the weight of more allegations than even he could fight his way out of. His assertions that he had never been drilled by the NCAA and that he had been done in by a weaselly player and overzealous hedge-hopping journalist-types did him less than no good at the end.

In the meantime, his much-vilified successor at UCLA has at least one, and in all likelihood only one, more game -- Thursday, against top-rated Arizona, in the first round of the Pacific 10 Conference Tournament.

Harrick goes out looking for all the world like Bobby Fuller, the man who sang "I Fought The Law (And The law Won)." Lavin, on the other hand, goes out after a two-month rendition of "Thanks For The Memories," dancing while he dangled.

Harrick goes out with a laundry list of run-of-the-mill violations that are still pending, from academic fraud to paying players. Lavin goes out for what UCLA fans would tell you are more serious violations -- combing his hair straight back, and not winning enough.

But that they went out the way they came in -- within days of each other -- is a delicious irony, at least if you don't mind stretching the definition of irony beyond its reasonable limits.

Now irony would be Lavin getting the Georgia job, but even God doesn't tend to work in ways that are that obvious.

This much, though, is clear. Harrick has now left two jobs in shame and ignominy, and it is unlikely, though not impossible, that he will get another swing, even in the ethically generous world of college basketball.

If getting fired at UCLA for lying to his boss about an expense account was seamy but not repellent, getting fired at Georgia after the mess he left at Rhode Island was both.

Lavin, who lived his shame and ignominy while on the job, and often while on the job during the NCAA Tournament, leaves with his dignity intact and the only blotch on his reputation being judged an unworthy successor to the House Of Wooden.

Just like everyone since the man who built the house, as it turns out.

The timing is what gets you in the end. Harrick was cracked Nov. 6, 1996, for getting caught running a hinky dinner charge (with several recruits on the tab) past former athletics director Peter Dalis, and then passing on several opportunities to fess up to Dalis. Lavin, who had been an assistant for two years and the recruiting coordinator for only a few months, was handed the job, largely on the basis of being in the building.

Harrick never forgave Lavin, but got over it eventually, went on to URI and Georgia and re-established both programs. Lavin pushed out six consecutive NCAA Tournament teams, each of them condemned ahead of time by the Los Angeles media and the UCLA fan base.

Harrick and Lavin nearly ended up facing each other in 2001, when both the Bruins and Bulldogs were stuck in the East Regional in Greensboro, N.C., but Georgia lost in the first round to Missouri, which lost to Duke, which beat UCLA in the regional semifinal in Philadelphia.

That's what passed for crossed paths between these two men until now, when Lavin finally lost his footing in the hamster wheel after seven years' hard running, while Harrick was dropped from a burning building he helped set ablaze.

Now they will depart as they came in, the pink slips dated closely enough to link them, albeit tenuously, in the long and sometimes odd history of college basketball.

And while more people felt sorry for Harrick when he left UCLA than for Lavin coming in, the opposite is now true six and half years later. Lavin becomes the quasi-sympathetic figure because he was fired for mere cause -- media and alumni dissatisfaction and a nine-win season. Lavin will coach again, because his record is more intriguing than his hair.

And Harrick? His case will be made now only by his acolytes and truest believers, and it is hard to know a university so desperate for success that it would gamble on him.

Unless maybe Robert Wickenheiser, the now-defrocked president at St. Bonaventure, gets another gig. And while weirder things than this have not happened, the possibility exists that they some day might.

After all, when you know it just can't happen, it always does. But that's just God being the wacky prankster again -- just to see the looks on our faces.

Ray Ratto is a columnist with the San Francisco Chronicle and a regular contributor to ESPN.com