Last night, Lance Stephenson made the most recent batch of rumors about his never-ending, tenuous recruitment real. He chose to play basketball for the Cincinnati Bearcats, meaning I again have to go through a post where I struggle to not type "Cincinatti" instead of "Cincinnati." I don't know why I do that, but I always do.

Naturally, there are bigger issues at stake than my weird spelling tics. Chief among them is the theme -- common by this point -- that Doc Brown just screeched up in the Delorean and shuffled the Bearcats back to the future. After all, former University of Cincinnati President Nancy Zimpher devoted much of her energies to ridding the basketball program of the perception that it was willing to take on questionable recruits with negligible interest in academics. Part of these energies involved asking Bob Huggins to take his mock turtlenecks and go home. And so Cincinnati was clean and quiet, for a little while.

On June 1, Zimpher officially left the school to become president at SUNY. Already, the Bearcats are back in the game. With Stephenson, emphatically so. It's hard to emphasize just how questionable Stephenson is: there are already issues surrounding his eligibility (the NCAA will be launching an investigation into an MTV2 show about Stephenson's life any day now), his attitude, his pending sexual assault case, and so on. Throw in the usual risks you take with one-and-done players -- they don't show up for class in the spring at best; they aid in a complete and utter breakdown of your program at worst -- and you can see the stakes here. Cincinnati isn't just playing a risky bet. They're going all in.

It reeks of desperation, which, little known fact, actually smells like Bob Huggins's cologne. And so the circle of life is complete.

Related: Big East Basketball