Pitino: Universities and coaches should be fined, no post-season bans
Louisville coach Rick Pitino spoke Friday about the pain his team experienced when they were told they couldn't participate in the post-season. He'd like to prevent that pain for other teams.
The University imposed a post-season ban on this year's team for transgressions that were alleged to have happened years ago. The current team - including a pair of fifth-year transfers, Damion Lee and Trey Lewis - are punished despite only one player, junior Mangok Mathiang, having been on campus during the alleged NCAA misconduct.
"My feeling is with the NCAA, I think it is wrong to penalize these kids in this regard," Pitino said. "I think when, back in the old days when players gambled and they took them down and there was a scandal and they took them out and made them ineligible for life. They deserved to be, they gambled. But in this case, when you're not directly involved, it's my belief that it should be automatic that you are fined $10 million dollars and the coaches get fined 50 percent of their salaries if they know about it."
He paused before amending that previous statement, "Doesn't matter, they should be fined 50 percent of their salaries, because they were leading. That's what happens on Wall Street. If JP Morgan does something wrong, Jamie Dimon didn't know anything about it, but that person is going to pay an $800 million dollar fine and that's what I believe should happen if they players... now, if our players were involved in this, they should be out of the tournament and should not be allowed to play. That's my opinion, but that is not the way it works."
"All this investigating, it should be immediately," Pitino explained. "You should kill the university pocketbook right away and take that money and put it in a scholarship for needy kids to go to college and athletes and so on. This is wrong. It's a bad system, but that doesn't mean we are not wrong in what we've done. The limited knowledge that I know, we were wrong - it should have never gone on. It turns my stomach."
Louisville landed a pair of fifth-year seniors, Trey Lewis from Cleveland State and Damion Lee from Drexel, during the off-season. Both came to Louisville in the hopes of participating in the NCAA Tournament for the first time. Now, neither will get to play in the post-season. Breaking that news to Lewis and Lee was painful, Pitino said Friday.
On Saturday, his team beat Boston College by 32 points in what would be the first of its last nine games of the season. After the game, the players talked about trying to close out the season strong despite not having the post-season to play for.
Pitino says he believes in Tom Jurich and stands behind Tom's decision. "We've got a great leader and we're going to follow that leader."
The Cardinals' coach also made clear that he had no knowledge of any of the wrongdoing in this case. Pitino said he asked everyone he could think of when he found out about Katina Powell, the Louisville madam's allegations in her book.
"I just don't understand any of this," Pitino said. "I still have to be interviewed. I come out and say, 'I didn't know anything.' I said this yesterday, 'There's not one coach in America, not one junior college coach, not one, that would ever tolerate this behavior. Forget me, not anybody, nobody would tolerate. ... There must be a price to pay for that behavior, certainly, but this team shouldn't pay that price unfortunately."