The men’s basketball program is already under NCAA probation for the 2015 scandal. Pitino faced a five-game suspension during the upcoming season as part of the penalties; in addition, Louisville was ordered to return money received for NCAA tournament appearances from 2012 through 2015 and to vacate 123 wins during that period, including the 2013 national championship. The university has appealed the ruling.
Pitino, 65, found success at nearly every NCAA stop he made in a coaching career that began in the mid-1970s. At Boston University, his first head coaching job, he led the Terriers to their first NCAA tournament appearance in 24 years. Pitino parlayed that success into a two-year run at Providence, where he guided the Friars to the 1987 Final Four. Then, after a two-year run coaching the New York Knicks, he left his dream NBA job in 1989 to take over at tradition-rich but scandal-plagued Kentucky, even though the Wildcats would be banned from live television in his first season and from the NCAA tournament in his first two seasons. After that, however, Pitino quickly had Kentucky back among the nation’s elite, with a memorable Elite Eight appearance in the Wildcats’ first post-probation season in 1992 and a Final Four bid the season after that, his first of three appearances in the national semifinals at the school. In 1996, he led Kentucky to its first national title in 18 years.
After a thoroughly unsuccessful four-year run as coach and team president of the Boston Celtics, he was back at another faded Kentucky power: Louisville, which had not won an NCAA tournament game in Denny Crum’s last four seasons.
More success followed, even as Louisville pinballed its way from Conference USA, to the Big East, to one season in the American Athletic Conference before finally landing securely in the ACC, the school coming out ahead in the NCAA’s football-driven conference-realignment wars even though the Cardinals’ football program has never been regarded as a power. The school’s athletic programs were buoyed financially — just like every other big-time NCAA program — by their apparel agreement with a major athletic brand, in this case Adidas, a relationship that began in the mid-1990s and continued throughout Pitino’s tenure. Last month, the school announced that its athletes would continue to sport the brand in a deal worth $160 million over 10 years.
Ironically, Pitino decried the shoe companies’ presence in basketball recruiting, where prospects attend summer camps and tournaments sponsored by the sneaker companies with the hopes that they both attend colleges that have agreements with those companies and then continue to wear the product should they continue their careers professionally.
“I never thought that shoes would be the reason you recruit players,” Pitino said in 2014. “It’s a factor. It’s a factor. I think we need to deal with that. I think we need to get the shoe companies out of the lives of young athletes. I think we need to get it back to where parents have more of a say than peripheral people. But that’s easier said than done. I don’t know how to do that. It’s like trying to get the [recruiting] runners out of the game. I know we try to do our best to do that, but I don’t know, I don’t know how to do that.”
He never was able to figure that out, and it led to his downfall.
Article Appeared @https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/early-lead/wp/2017/09/27/rick-pitino-reportedly-fired-by-louisville-in-wake-of-federal-corruption-case/?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_pitino-12p%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.aaf19705a97a