NCAA to Pitino, fellow coaches: Stay in control of your program
The NCAA’s message to head coaches regarding wrongdoing under their watch has become clear.
It doesn’t matter if you knew what was going on; it only matters that you should have known.
Louisville’s Rick Pitino becomes the latest to learn this lesson, slapped with a five-game suspension among a host of other men’s basketball program-wide penalties as a result of a prostitution-and-strippers scandal that stretched over a period of four years and could cost the Cardinals their 2013 national title. The NCAA Committee on Infractions, in its findings released Thursday morning, stated repeatedly that such a case was unprecedented.
You can parse through all the sordid details if you want. The NCAA has made its report public.
And what you’ll notice — pretty clearly — is something you’ve seen and heard from a lot of head coaches who end up investigated by the NCAA: denial.
Pitino has said repeatedly, including to the NCAA, that he had no knowledge of the lurid (and, in many cases, illegal) activities going on at an on-campus dormitory that housed predominantly basketball players. He and the Louisville athletics department have tried to frame the scandal as the responsibility of one rogue actor — former director of operations Andre McGee. What you’ll also notice is that the NCAA doesn’t buy it.
That’s why Pitino was hit with a “failure to monitor” penalty, a five-game Atlantic Coast Conference game suspension, and his name attached to some very significant vacated victories. The NCAA doesn’t believe that ignorance is bliss; it is punishable.
“From January 2010, the time the head coach hired the former operations director, through April 2014, when the former operations director left the institution, the head coach failed to monitor his activities in Minardi Hall with prospects visiting campus,” the NCAA report states. “He essentially placed a peer of the student-athletes in a position of authority over them and visiting prospects and assumed that all would behave appropriately in an environment that was, for all practical purposes, a basketball dormitory.”
Pitino released a statement Thursday denying that the NCAA discovered anything he could have done to stop McGee, who again was framed as a rogue actor, embarking on this strip-tease-and-sex-party scheme alone and in secret. But an assistant coach made a comment to the team that it had practiced poorly “because y’all had strippers in there all night,” one prospect told the NCAA. Another prospect said the activities were common knowledge, though not every player on the team knew about them.
Pitino and Louisville are appealing the NCAA’s findings — despite the fact that the NCAA accepted the school’s already-self-imposed postseason ban — solely because they don’t want the 2013 national title vacated.
But the most important part about Thursday’s report was that it didn’t matter what Pitino said; it was about what he didn’t do. And if that doesn’t send a strong message to head coaches everywhere, I’m not sure what can.