Pitino’s assertions don’t pass muster with NCAA
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 basket- ball dormitory.”
Pitino released a statement Thursday afternoon denying that the NCAA discovered anything he could have done to stop McGee, who again was framed as a rogue actor, embarking on this striptease-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. And 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 and that a five-game suspension for a head basketball coach is barely a slap on the wrist — solely because they don’t want the 2013 national championship vacated.
From their side, this whole process has been about protecting that title. It hasn’t been about how irresponsible a head coach must be to be unaware of strippers and prostitutes being called to entertain his players and his recruits — many of whom were
minors — in an on-campus dormitory 12 times (plus twice off campus) over a four-year period.
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.