After what had to have been one of the worst weekends of his professional career, Louisville basketball coach Rick Pitino sat down with Sports Illustrated’s Seth Davis and answered a number of questions about his program’s scandal, its postseason ban, and his future with U of L. “Dr. Ramsey had to OK it, if Dr. Ramsey didn’t want to okay it, he could have vetoed it. But Tom made the decision”.
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Pitino offered an alternative to the NCAA’s tortured crime-and-punishment system, which nearly always penalizes players who had nothing to do with the violations.
It’s hard to overstate the seriousness of the penalty, given UofL’s chances for a deep run in the NCAAs with no dominant team in sight on the college basketball landscape.
Louisville’s streak of nine straight NCAA tournament appearances will end with the ban. We don’t know. They wouldn’t say, despite multiple attempts by the media to ask. This is a team that is very much favored to go very far in the tournament’.
McGee left Louisville after the 2014 season to become an assistant at University of Missouri-Kansas City. Ramsey said the ban is for the NCAA and Atlantic Coast Conference tournaments. NCAA investigations are ongoing.
Pitino offered his critique of a Louisville administration and board of trustees that created an investigative committee that didn’t include the athletic director: He’s not a big fan of that set-up.
Powell’s allegations in her tell-all book rocked the Louisville community and led to four separate investigations into Pitino’s program. We’ve got a great leader and we’ve got to follow that leader.
“See these guys standing behind me, these guys truly got our back”, said Lewis a fifth year transfer from Drexel. I was in the stands that day on a discount ticket. None of the current players was implicated in the scandal.
The coach said using the word painful to describe the meeting was an understatement. “The most bothersome part of this process is that there are people who are being punished who had nothing to do with what caused this discipline to occur and Andre McGee has withdrawn himself from the purview of the NCAA and he can not be punished”. They are totally innocent.
I can go on and on. The coach said players hugged and cried, with graduate transfers and leading scorers Damion Lee and Trey Lewis particularly emotional because they came to Louisville this season with high hopes of playing in the NCAA Tournament.
“Damion and Trey have nothing to look forward to”. Yet now the season has been reduced to nine games.
“The University of Louisville determined that it was reasonable to conclude that violations had occurred in the men’s basketball program in the past”, Louisville president James Ramsey said. But it was the best decision at the time for the program and there were a lot of factors involved in that decision and I’m sure there are a lot of factors involved in Louisville. Pitino attempted to take Ramsey off the hook, after he had been vilified for the past 24 hours in this shell-shocked town. He praised athletics director Tom Jurich.
The ACC now has two schools not going to the post-season. The coach even stated that he believed there wasn’t any possibility of a postseason ban coming this year. For all the talk of how Calipari and Kentucky play fast and loose with the NCAA rules, it’s now time to stop. The team has been very successful and won a national title in 2013. He got himself a lawyer and I never spoke to him again.
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UofL’s final home game is March 1 against Georgia Tech. The Cards then close out their season four days later at Virginia.
