Pitino admits coaching career is likely finished

Rick Pitino seems resigned to his fate. It’s sinking in that the FBI investigation into corruption in college basketball that led to his firing at Louisville likely will be the end of his coaching career at that level.

“There was one job this past year that I really did want,” Pitino said in an interview with ESPN. “They called the NCAA and the NCAA said, ‘We’re handcuffed. The FBI will not al- low us to investigate. We can’t give you a yes or no on Rick Pitino because we’re not allowed to investigate.’ I’m not really thinking about coaching again in the future because I’m not in control of that. I feel it’s over for me.”

Pitino is going on a media tour to promote his book, “Pitino: My Story,” which was co-written with Seth Kaufman. In it, Pitino acknowledges his “coaching career is possibly finished.”

The book is a memoir of a 40-year coaching career that spanned from the NBA to college and also focuses on the rocky end to his time at Louisville — the 2015 sex scandal, the recent FBI investigation and his firing. As he has done numerous times, Pitino wrote he had no knowledge of the stripper parties organized by former staffer Andre McGee.

“My inquisitors had no evidence I knew about Andre McGee’s stripper events because none existed,” he wrote. “As I just explained, I had no clue. No one they interviewed said I was complicit in any way. Additionally, they had no evidence that any other employee in my program knew about Andre’s antics either. There are probably multiple reasons for that — starting with the fact Andre knew I would have fired him the moment I learned of a single compliance infraction and ending with the fact that his ‘events’ reportedly involved potentially criminal acts like prostitution and underage sex.”