Louisville and head coach Rick Pitino are accustomed to preparing for NCAA tournament games this time of year, but this year Pitino is busy defending his program in the public eye while it sits home watching from afar while serving a self-imposed one-year postseason ban as the NCAA continues to investigate the program.
Appearing in an interview on ESPN’s Mike & Mike morning show Tuesday, Pitino addressed the current situation at Louisville that has landed his program on some hot NCAA water. The NCAA is currently investigating the program for alleged recruiting violations involving a former escort and former Louisville staff member Andre McGee. It is alleged McGee hired dancers to have sex with recruits while visiting the Louisville program, and Pitino is making sure McGee takes the blame for the situation.
“You have your dorm security people, who are being interviewed by the NCAA, then you have your graduate assistants,” Pitino said Tuesday on ESPN’s Mike & Mike. “One unfortunate one was Andre McGee, whose sole responsibility was to make sure the kids get to school on time, make sure they get up in the mornings when they have a presentation or breakfast with a head coach or family.
“And then we have another graduate assistant. So the problem we had is, we did have people in place. And the one person we did have in place, whose sole responsibility was to make sure they do the right things, and unfortunately that was Andre McGee. That was the problem there.”
Pitino acknowledges the severity of the accusations and says those guilty of failing to operate according to the rules deserve to be punished. Pitino has said before he was not happy about the postseason ban on his program and believes the school should have been fined instead.
“Now you hear things that they all had dollar bills handed out and those types of things. If money was paid for, for things other than a strip party, per se, then a lot of people are in some serious criminal trouble. That’s something that the Commonwealth attorney and the investigators are going to handle, if money has changed hands for those types of things.”
McGee resigned from his position as an assistant coach at the University of Missouri-Kansas City last October following the revelations from the sex scandal at Louisville. Pitino would love to get his former graduate assistant in a room to ask him some questions face-to-face.
“If I could just get Andre McGee in a room for 10 minutes, I would say to him: ‘Why would you do this? What purpose did it serve? We didn’t need this to get recruits,'” Pitino said. “We’re not Kentucky, where we’re recruiting the one-and-dones. We have a different way we recruit. It didn’t make any sense what was going on. How these women infiltrated our program is very disturbing to me. And how Andre McGee, I should not say how, but why did Andre McGee get tied into this? Only Andre can make those answers. Someday I want him to do that. The last text I sent to him was, ‘Andre, I asked for one thing, and that’s for you to be honest and tell the truth.'”
You have to love how Pitino dropped a nice little jab at Kentucky and his counterpart in Lexington (John Calipari), right? Of course, for now, Kentucky has the upper hand on Louisville even if it does recruit one-and-dones. Kentucky is taking a four-seed into the east region in the NCAA tournament and will face Stony Brook in the first round in Des Moines. A win likely sets up a basketball blueblood matchup of Kentucky and Indiana to get out of the first weekend, with North Carolina likely waiting in Philadelphia the following week.
Louisville will be watching with mild interest at home. To add insult to injury, Louisville hosts the South regionals next week.
[ESPN]
