Rick Pitino is back where many people feel he belongs, coaching a high-major* Division I basketball team in a major media market and immediately lending gravitas and credibility to everything he touches just by association.
Life moves fast, etc.
It’s not long ago Pitino was persona non grata in Division I, exiled to Greece (and upstate New York) for a litany of crimes, including some that the FBI took a particular interest in back when the FBI was doing investigations and not enacting a grim men’s weekend in Las Vegas under the auspices of national security.
For the Pitino-curious, let’s zoom through this real quick. He’s someone who has been under NCAA scrutiny since jump street, allegedly paying for flights and arranging for used cars for his players in exchange for tickets back when he was an assistant at Hawaii in the 1970s. Victimless crimes, and he was largely scandal-free during stints at Boston University, Providence and Kentucky, which he took over mid-scandal in the late-1980s and led to a title a few years later. He’s someone who constantly flirted with the NBA and never seemed to stay in one place too long until he arrived at Louisville in 2001 and established a juggernaut to rival—and occasionally surpass—his former employer in Lexington.
It’s here that Pitino began to either A. not pay enough attention to what was happening around his program or B. willingly allowed assistants to hire escorts to “entertain” recruits. That’s bad, and the NCAA took some notice and Louisville self-imposed a postseason ban and Pitino might have survived the whole thing until the feds started digging around and unearthed some pay-to-play schemes that seem utterly charming now that NIL is putting six figures into the hands of practically everyone with a crossover but were subject to true NCAA hand-wringing at the time.