Rick Pitino is the embodiment of men’s college basketball.
Pitino represents all the intense passion and glorious moments the sport has cultivated over the decades. At the same time, he is a reminder of all things that have long anchored the sport into the murky waters of corruption and scandal. There have always been two distinctive sides to the sport — a sport that millions obsess over every March — and no one has ever done it better than the man in the sharp-looking suits and slick black hair known as “The Godfather.”
The NCAA Tournament is upon us and Pitino again has resurrected a program from an afterthought to a legit Final Four contender.
In his second season at St. John’s, Pitino has guided the Red Storm to its highest ranking in the AP Poll since 1991, the first outright Big East regular season title since 1985, and the first Big East tournament title since 2000. The Red Storm play with a hard-nosed and tenacious style, and of course, execute Pitino’s classic full-court press defense.
The resurrection of St. John’s is the latest Mount Rushmore accomplishment for the intense and charismatic Pitino.
In a career that began in the 1970s, Pitino also has won two national titles, been to seven Final Fours, and won nearly 900 games.
The 72-year-old has coached six different programs to the NCAA Tournament and won conference tournament titles at five different programs — both are firsts in NCAA history. Pitino also was the first coach to lead three different programs to the Final Four, and the first to win national titles at two different schools.
There is no doubt that no one is better at turning around programs — and transforming them instantly.
The year before he took over at Boston University, Providence, Kentucky, Louisville, and Iona, those programs were an average of six games below .500. In Pitino’s first seasons at those schools, each program was .500 or better, and in his second season, each won at least 21 games.
The only one to have a winning record when he took over was St. Johns who went 18-15 before he arrived, but improved to 20-13 in his first year and are now 26-4 heading into the tournament.
Pitino rebuilds programs, wins a lot of games, and championships, and has done it over and over again.
Yet, Pitino is not heralded as some of his past and present contemporaries.
John Wooden, Mike Krzyzewski, and Bobby Knight are often cited as the top three coaches of all time.
The Wizard of Westwood won a record 10 national titles at UCLA, Coach K won 1,202 games and five national titles at Duke, while The General won over 900 games and three national titles at Indiana. Yes, even with the notorious temper tantrums and bully tactics, Knight was always a brilliant coach.
So why is Pitino not considered in the same breath as them?
Part of that is because Pitino is a bit of a vagabond.
Unlike Wooden, Krzyzewski, Dean Smith, and others, he never anchored himself to one program for a long time. The longest period was at Louisville where he successfully rehabbed his legacy during a widely successful 16 seasons.
Pitino also left the collegiate ranks to pursue his NBA coaching dreams three times, twice with the New York Knicks. His tenure with his hometown Knicks was pretty successful but those three-plus years with the Boston Celtics were a flaming dumpster fire. Pitino went 107 and 146 and missed the playoffs every season before resigning 34 games into the season.
It did provide us with the rant “Larry Bird is not walking through that door.”
The other part preventing Pitino from being named as one of the greatest coaches is of course scandals.
During his second time coaching in the Bluegrass State, Pitino’s program had multiple scandals, including having his mistress threaten to extort money, there were also allegations of strippers being hired to have sex with recruits, and players being paid to suit up for the Cardinals.
Ironically, his time at Kentucky was void of scandal and it is a program historically identified with multiple scandals. That is what led to his hiring by the Wildcats in the first place.
At Louisville, Pitino had victories vacated, including the 2013 national championship, and he was fired. The scandal forced him into coaching exile as he was forced to take a job coaching the Greek Professional League, where he led his team to a pair of championships.
Pitino had to pay his penance and didn’t get another chance in college until Iona hired him in 2020, which he of course turned around and led him to be hired at St. John’s.
Yet, should the scandals matter in a sport that has long been a cesspool of corruption?
There have been numerous point-shaving schemes, boosters gifting cars and money to players, falsifying academic grades, agents signing players while they are still in college, all the suspect recruiting methods, and even the cover-up of a murder.
Terms such as “Level 1 rules violations,” “show cause,” and “vacated victories” are now part of the sports lexicon, thanks in much part to men’s college basketball.
The men often mentioned in the conversation for the greatest of all time are dirty or a little dirty.
The longstanding academic fraud at UNC that began under Dean Smith’s tenure and bled over into Roy Williams’ time as coach, the infamous point-shaving scandal at Kentucky under Adolph Rupp, and the numerous incidents of inappropriate behavior by Knight at both Indiana and Texas Tech.
Yes, even the most hallowed men in sports history lived in the grey area.
During his dynasty run at UCLA, Wooden’s players were “taken care of” by controversial booster Sam Gilbert, who later served as an agent for star players and was indicted for money laundering.
Coach K had a player (Corey Magette) play in a championship game who was later found ineligible for improper payments. There was also a notable investigation that uncovered that Zion Williamson’s parents received money from an ex-Adidas executive.
Additionally, UConn’s Jim Calhoun, Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim, Kansas’ Bill Self, and Arkansas’ John Calipari have all either had to vacate wins or be suspended by their schools or the NCAA.
No one is clean, and all of them are also in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame alongside Pitino.
Pitino is a historically great coach, whose accomplishments are towering but so are his failures. All of this makes him the man who embodies the sport more authentically than anyone else has in the past fifty years.
Raymond Partsch III is the co-host of “RP3 & Meche” which is broadcast weekdays (11-1) on ESPN 103.7 Lafayette and 104.1 Lake Charles — Southwest Louisiana’s Sports Station.