UCLA blew it by not hiring Rick Pitino
Dan Wolken: School could have gotten a great coach instead of a good one
There was one surefire way out of this train wreck of a UCLA coaching search that ended Tuesday with the hire of Cincinnati basketball coach Mick Cronin, one move that could have erased the incompetence of the last 90 days as displayed by a group of college athletics bureaucrats who clearly had no idea what they were doing.
UCLA could have had Rick Pitino, who was practically begging for the job. Instead, it settled on someone who was at best a fifth choice and has been to the NCAA Tournament’s second weekend once in his career.
That’s not to say Cronin can’t do well at UCLA. He’s built a solid track record at Cincinnati by employing a grinding defensive style, and if he can tap into Southern California recruiting the way any competent UCLA coach should, he will see the Sweet 16 sooner rather than later.
But think about how UCLA could have shaken up college basketball by making one bold, albeit controversial, move. Cronin is a shoulder shrug. Pitino would have been a big, fat middle finger to those who believe UCLA is too timid to do what it takes to start winning national titles again.
Pitino is sitting out there somewhere in Greece right now, dying to come back to college basketball and texting reporters why he’d be a fit at this open job or that one. Maybe St. John’s will take the leap.
But nobody needed him more than UCLA, a program that decided early in this search it was too high and mighty to be rescued by a college basketball pariah.
News flash: It’s not. Or, at least, the Bruins shouldn’t be.
Because once you conduct a coaching search that has bounced from getting rebuffed by Washington’s Mike Hopkins to offering Kentucky’s John Calipari less money than he’s currently making to deciding Jamie Dixon’s $8 million buyout was too much to then deciding that Rick Barnes’ $5 million buyout was OK, only to get an eleventhhour stiff arm because athletics director Dan Guerrero couldn’t close the deal, can you really claim there was a bottom to the embarrassment?
Here’s how it would have played out if UCLA hired Pitino: an immediate rush of Twitter snark about strippers and Italian restaurants, a few days worth of tsk-tsk columns from sportswriters, and then a lot of wins.
And make no mistake: Pitino would win really, really big. Given the current muddled state of college basketball, where even its biggest cheerleaders have essentially accepted that it’s corrupt to the core, what exactly is the point of steering away from Pitino because of allegations that still have not directly tied him to knowledge about Adidas’ deal to steer Brian Bowen to Louisville?
Admittedly, this is a turn for me. I thought Pitino wouldn’t and shouldn’t coach in college again after Louisville fired him in October 2017 given the nature of the problems that piled up on his watch.
Although I never believed Pitino knew of or endorsed the escort and stripper parties that led to Louisville vacating the 2013 national title, I had no problem holding him responsible for hiring bad assistants and not having proper oversight of his program.
The same could be said of the Bowen fiasco. Even if Pitino never explicitly said, “Hey Adidas, help me get this player,” he should have known that a top-50 recruit Louisville hadn’t been involved with previously falling into his lap in June was too good to be true.
“In my 40 years of coaching, this is the luckiest I’ve been,” Pitino said in a radio interview, before the FBI uncovered that it wasn’t luck at all but rather a $100,000 scheme engineered by Adidas executives Jim Gatto and Merl Code along with Christian Dawkins, a creation of the basketball underworld who helped facilitate deals between prospects and a sports agent.
To this day, Pitino has denied his involvement in any of the wrongdoing and protested the idea that Louisville should have fired him, which is of course ridiculous.
Understand, with Pitino, he is never going to make it easy to like or forgive him. So be it.
But if UCLA was watching the Final Four closely Saturday, it would have seen what a future with Pitino might look like as Bruce Pearl led Auburn to within a whisper of the national championship game.
You can pretty much divide college sports fans into two groups when it comes to wrongdoing and a track record tied to NCAA infractions. Half of them are in on the joke and don’t really care, and the other half genuinely believes there’s a place for second chances. They will buy whatever brand of baloney you sell them as long as it tastes good.
People like Pearl and Pitino satisfy that appetite, and if you’re UCLA, you should have seriously reconsidered the entire track of the search after whiffing on Barnes and started thinking about whether Pitino’s baggage was worth it.
Make no mistake, UCLA hired a good coach Tuesday. But there was one great coach available, who wouldn’t have just taken the job but probably would have done it at a discount.
Getting Pitino at this point in his career, hungry and motivated to restore his reputation, was a once-in-a-generation opportunity for UCLA. The Bruins were foolish to let it fly by. But given the way they conducted the search from start to finish, that can’t be much of a surprise.