The litany of stupid decisions made by Larry Eustachy after two of his team's road losses is long and storied by this point. Anyone with an Internet hook-up from Ames to Antarctica has heard at least one about Leisure-Suit Larry.

But of all the wrong choices the Iowa State basketball coach has made, perhaps the dumbest has been the least discussed. He had the poor taste to get caught after his second straight disappointing season.

This week's scandal is unfolding in a place where the biggest action in May used to be at the town's bandshell, where groups like The Onion Creek Cloggers perform at twilight for picnicking families. It's Ames' family-friendly atmosphere that Eustachy has cited regularly, first when he arrived there from Utah State and later when he had to put up with questions about leaving for Louisville and elsewhere -- questions he surely looks back on longingly right now.

But anyone paying attention to his five years in the heartland was not surprised by this week's revelations in the Des Moines Register about Eustachy's clumsy post-game partying at Missouri and Kansas State.

I was on a plane to Utah the day ISU hired Eustachy in 1998, on assignment for the Ames Tribune. What I found in Logan was tremendous respect for his basketball knowledge. But some also shrugged their shoulders at his departure. This is a town where they look at you funny at some restaurants if you order a beer, as I learned first-hand.

While there, a local reporter smiled as he suggested I get a whiff of the extra ingredient Larry added to his press conference orange juices. The guy knew what he was talking about.

But as the Cyclones rose to become one of the nation's dominant teams between 1999 and 2001, that was an open secret. Eustachy was famous among ISU fans for mingling into the morning with them at Kelly's, the cornerstone bar in Kansas City's Westport district, after his work was done at the Big 12 tournament.

And most people laughed when he made this statement months after No. 15 Hampton upset his second-seeded team in the first round of the 2001 NCAA Tournament in Idaho: "While I was there, I hit every bar in Boise. I can tell you the name of every bar from Boise to Ames."

It's all reminiscent of Dennis Hopper's line near the end of "Speed." Losers are drunks. Larry was eccentric.

But, not so much after the past two seasons, when his team went a combined 29-33.

As rumblings of his entirely legal but downright dim misbehavior began surfacing this winter, his athletic director, Bruce Van De Velde, acted as if the man he had granted a 10-year, eight-figure extension had been living a double life.

No one who ever spent 10 minutes with Iowa's highest-paid state employee ever mistook him for a missionary. But, it shouldn't have taken a newspaper's inquiries to prompt any scoldings about setting a good example (or to send Eustachy into rehab, for that matter).

None of which makes Eustachy a bad person. He is smart and funny. He is also a man with a disease, and he admits it.

In our Oprah-driven nation, we see acts of contrition all the time. What we don't see so often is the sinner publicly thanking he who revealed the sin. Eustachy did so Wednesday to the Register's Tom Witosky, the man who temporarily derailed his professional life.

It's also easy to forget the feelings of Stacy Eustachy, a genuinely nice woman who has shown more loyalty to her husband than he showed to her or the players he said "sucked" during his mingling with enemy fans. It's easier to forget how fortunate Larry is that he didn't get himself or someone else killed hustling back from Columbia, Mo., in his trailer in time for practice on what had to be little sleep and dulled reflexes.

Now Eustachy will probably get the help he needs without the encumbrance of a job. Too bad he isn't a player. At a school where previous administrations and Eustachy himself have allowed winners like Sam Mack, Kenny Pratt and Omar Bynum to play shortly after finding trouble, second chances used to be sacrosanct.