LEXINGTON, Ky. -- Take a mental snapshot of the Hal Mumme resignation, college football fans. It's a keeper.

You may never again see an ascendant coaching career crash and burn in such pyrotechnic fashion.

In late 1996, Mumme was surprisingly plucked by Kentucky athletic director C.M. Newton from Division II Valdosta State and plunked down in the Southeastern Conference, finest league in the land. And for three years, he made everyone think he was big enough for the job.

In synergy with Tim Couch, Mumme was on a rocket ride from obscurity to offensive genius. His teams set records, won games, earned consecutive bowl bids and filled every seat at a basketball school. He was Steve Spurrier on training wheels. And then, in a breathtaking 12 months littered with losses and scandal, the wheels came off.

The job proved too big for Small-Time Hal Mumme after all.

He thought making it big meant drawing up cool passing plays. That's all.

He never saw much need for rugged defense, solid special teams or friends in high places -- which led to a striking lack of lamentation when Kentucky announced Mumme's very forced resignation Tuesday afternoon. In a fight for his job, Mumme looked around and found that nobody had his back.

(Mumme) was a master with X's and O's and a disaster with P's and Q's. His final staff was a molten mass of dissension. He was thin-skinned and petty, and in his final year he repeatedly flunked relations with both the public and media.

Nor, apparently, was he real big on making sure his staff followed the rules. Mumme's program has joined Alabama on the NCAA's Headed For Probation List for its involvement in the truly tawdry Memphis recruiting scandal. (Other SEC schools could land in that soup as the investigation continues.)

In early January, recruiting coordinator Claude Bassett earned a piece of SEC lore with a bizarre, live-television confession to what The (Louisville) Courier-Journal had printed a week before: he had ordered a staffer to send $1,400 in money orders to a Memphis high school football coach. Other violations have been uncovered in the school's internal investigation.

Headed for trouble and coming off an ugly 2-9 season, Kentucky made the perhaps-unprecedented move of pushing out its coach the day before National Signing Day. It might have been recruiting suicide, but Kentucky's brass made the move wisely. The school got out in front on the issue so that no recruit signed with the Wildcats under false pretense, should Mumme have been fired in the coming weeks.

The semantically (and contractually) correct term is a resignation, but there is no doubt that Kentucky told Mumme to beat it. He has been replaced by former offensive line coach Guy Morriss, Mumme's associate head coach -- a popular guy, but someone who has never even been a coordinator before.

Suddenly, Kentucky is back to its uninspiring old self.

And suddenly, Mumme has blown the opportunity of a coaching lifetime.

He arrived flippant and fun, but ill-equipped for all that an SEC football coach must deal with. He was a master with X's and O's and a disaster with P's and Q's. His final staff was a molten mass of dissension. He was thin-skinned and petty, and in his final year he repeatedly flunked relations with both the public and media.

In the giddy early years, Mumme was routinely lauded as the hero who enlivened a program drowning in dullness. They installed an air-raid siren at Commonwealth Stadium and piped favorite musician Jimmy Buffett over the speakers. And we all said what a dramatic upgrade he was from uninspired predecessors Jerry Claiborne and Bill Curry.

In a resounding irony, we learned that Mumme was no Claiborne and no Curry, all right.

Integrity? Claiborne ran a clean program. Mumme leaves with UK facing what could be another year of inquiry and speculation before learning its punishment.

Accountability? The dignified Curry stood tall in times of crisis -- rarely taller than when he faced the media the day he was fired. Mumme's final feint in a series of disappearing acts came yesterday, when he ducked the media and did not even issue a statement.

A flair for fake punts is nice, but it doesn't quite compensate for lacking those attributes.

Given Kentucky's decades-long legacy of cheating in both basketball and football, ousting Mumme was a mandatory move. The school's image is too fragile to countenance keeping a coach with major violations on his watch.

A sign of the times in Mumme's honeymoon phase in Lexington hangs outside Commonwealth Stadium. The mayor renamed a part of the street outside the place Hal Mumme Pass.

Today it should say Hal Mumme Passé. And the coach has no one to blame for that but himself.