Larry Brown is comin' to town.

One of the best-dressed coaches in basketball is packing up his Armani suits and is headed for State College.

The man who can't sit still for more than three years at a time is looking in the real estate section of the Centre Daily Times searching for a house in Happy Valley.

Maybe he'll even live next to JoePa.

Following his dismissal Tuesday as head coach of the San Antonio Spurs last Tuesday, Larry Brown will be the next men's basketball coach at Penn State.

Well, OK, maybe it's just a fantasy. But it's not a bad idea.

If Penn State is expected to compete in the Big Ten next year then some changes will have to be made. Number one will have to be a new head coach, and Larry Brown will fit the bill very nicely.

First of all, Brown is a proven winner at both the college and professional levels. He has a career record of 599-396 with six different teams. After leaving the Carolina Cougars of the ABA, he moved to and had success with the Denver Nuggets.

Then, he left the NBA to take his UCLA squad to the NCAA finals in 1980, upsetting No. 1 DePaul in the meantime.

Brown then followed that with two productive years with the Nets, but left to rebuild a dying Kansas squad. All he did was take the Jayhawks to the Final Four in 1986 and win a national championship in 1988.

Larry Brown is a winner plain and simple and Penn State needs that. Brown can also win on the road, something that Penn State Coach Bruce Parkhill has a lot of trouble doing.

For the last three seasons, Parkhill has turned his road warriors into road worriers with a 14-19 record. So far this year he's 4-4 in hostile territory but two of those losses were to James Madison and Butler, teams that Penn State should have beaten.

But the real kicker came on Saturday. At a neutral site, Parkhill's team lost to a middle-of-the-pack, Ivy League Penn squad. IVY LEAGUE!

But wait a minute, didn't Princeton offer to play the Lions in a home-and-home series? Parkhill turned them down! He wanted to play Penn. Good choice, Bruce. At least the fans would have tolerated a loss to Princeton.

Someone once said "Bruce Parkhill for President." I don't think so. If Parkhill were President we would have lost the Persian Gulf War -- it was on the road.

Brown is also a great developer of young talent. He has put players like Kiki Vandeweghe and Danny Manning in the pros. Parkhill had a shot at that but he blew it.

Penn State once had a guard named Mike Iuzzolino but he got tired of Parkhill's coaching and left for St. Francis (Pa.). All Iuzzolino, a guy who wasn't good enough to play for the Lions, did was make the Playboy All-America team as a scholar-athlete. By the way, he was also taken in the second round of the NBA draft by the Dallas Mavericks.

Iuzzolino now sits pretty with a two-year contract while he laughs at this year's inept Lions.

In order to succeed in the Big Ten you need a high-profile coach. That just isn't Bruce Parkhill. Brown would stir up the crowd and get those dead old farts that attend Penn State games up off their seats and cheer.

Getting people into the stands and getting them excited will happen with better recruits. Brown will get those recruits. He'd be able to get the inner city kids to come out to this hick town and light up what might be an otherwise empty 16,500-seat Convocation Center.

Overall, Parkhill's style just doesn't fit in the Big Ten and will not fill the seats of the new arena. Your average college basketball fan knows the names of the coaches of the successful Big Ten. Parkhill just isn't known well enough on a national level.

This has been a truly disappointing season for the Nittany Lions after last year's incredible performance in the NCAA tournament. In this type of season the axe must fall and the head that gets cut off, unfortunately, should be Parkhill's.

Then replace it with Larry Brown, or at the least Jim Valvano.