Pitino should be held accountable in escort scandal
Maybe there’s a better word to describe what happened at Louisville, but the first one that came to mind: sickening.
There were strippers and escorts, hired over and over again to entertain recruits and current basketball players and, in some cases, paid to have sex with them. There was an assistant coach, Andre McGee, who organized and orchestrated all of it; the sex acts, stripteases and cash totaled at least $5,400, the NCAA found.
And there was a head coach, Hall of Famer Rick Pitino, who allowed all this to happen under his watch.
The NCAA, in its notice of allegations made public Thursday, charged Pitino with a Level I violation for failing to monitor a member of his staff (McGee). The NCAA found that Pitino failed to spot-check the program to uncover potential compliance problems. He didn’t look for or evaluate red flags. He didn’t ask pointed questions or solicit honest feedback to determine if the system in place for monitoring McGee was working. Louisville plans to dispute the charge against Pitino.
Potential punishment for Pitino could include a show-cause penalty. At the very least, he can expect a significant suspension, much like Jim Boeheim’s ninegame ban a season ago.
But Louisville was not hit with a lack of institutional control charge, and the NCAA did not de- termine that Pitino knew his staffer was paying for women to have sex with recruits when it happened.
So, in a weird way, the NCAA’s notice of allegations probably resulted in a huge sigh of relief by Louisville officials. The worst of the punishment, it would appear, is in the past. Last year’s self-imposed postseason ban paid off.
But we can still feel icky about it. And it’s OK for us to pin a great deal of this on Pitino, even if he didn’t know exactly what happened when it did. Of course a coach can’t know everything going on, but this is different. Pitino should have known about this; it’s his program, and these sex-forrecruit arrangements took place over a period of years in an oncampus dormitory named for Pitino’s late brother-in-law.
Sure, head coaches like to turn a blind eye to recruiting visits. It’s a wink-wink, nudge-nudge, show ’em a good time kind of setup. But head coaches have to be smart. That’s why they talk to trainers, academic advisers and strength coaches, anyone who can keep the head coach in the loop about what players are talking about when coaches aren’t around — and what’s really going on.
There’s no excuse for not knowing, and thankfully the new NCAA penalty structure agrees. Coaches are now held accountable for what happens under their watch, whether they knew about it at the time or not. That’s the right approach for any and all wrongdoing.
And that’s exactly why Pitino should be held accountable here.