LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – Those of us who have experienced the NCAA’s Mock Selection exercise know how these tournament games with delicious storylines seem to crop up without anyone even trying. You put all the teams into a computer with the bracketing priorities already programmed in and, voila!, you wind up with a coach facing his former team, or two rivals on a collision course, or whatever.
No doubt, that was the case with Louisville’s NCAA Tournament first-round matchup with Minnesota, which will tip off the entire NCAA Tournament on Thursday at 12:15 p.m. in Des Moines, Iowa on CBS.
The matchup, however, was a stupid thing for the NCAA to allow to happen. Not for the teams. The players don’t much care. But everyone else associated with the game -- the coaches, the universities, the NCAA itself – are done a disservice by some of the storylines this game is going to drag into the public discussion.
Why, if you’re an NCAA selection committee, do you want to tip off your showcase event with a game that is going to throw back into public discussion such storylines as . . .
- Louisville’s firing of Rick Pitino, whose son, of course, coaches at Minnesota.
- The events that led up to Louisville’s firing of Rick Pitino, which include the biggest scandal perhaps in the history of college basketball, which continues to wind its way through federal court in the Southern District of New York, and about which the NCAA has done virtually nothing.
- The active lawsuit which Rick Pitino has against the university, in which the university has, in legal language, of course, trashed the former coach, and as part of which the coach has weighed in, with quite blunt language in a book on the topic, his feelings about the school’s current board of trustees and former president.
Now, look. Louisville coach Chris Mack has said nothing but nice things about Pitino, called him before taking the job, has gone out of his way to respect what he did here, and said Sunday night that he knows Richard Pitino, though not well.
But this is a game whose on-the-court intrigue is dwarfed by its off the court divisiveness. It’s not good for Mack, who gets the team back to the tournament in his first year and has to deal with this storyline. It’s not good for the Pitino family. It’s not good for U of L, which has all of these negatives cast back into the public discussion. And it’s not good for the NCAA, which doesn’t need to remind people of the scandal plaguing one of its signature sports.
“It’s the elephant in the room,” Mack said. “I coach a few of the guys who played for Coach Pitino, and it’s his son. I would hope for the Minnesota players, and for our guys, the game becomes about the game. You can’t control what people are going to talk about or write about or report on. But you can only beat a horse so long.”
This horse, I’m afraid, is going to be kicking for a while, so long as the courts keep bringing up the scandal that ensnared Pitino’s staff. And it gets new life when the NCAA does things like it did today.
Speaking with reporters in Minnesota, Richard Pitino echoed Mack in tone.
“It’s not going to be about me,” he said. “I’m not going to be: ‘It’s revenge,’ or anything like that. It’s about our players, it’s about this program. We worked really, really hard to put ourselves in position to be one of the 19 percent that gets to make the NCAA tournament in college basketball.”
But this situation takes the attention off the players and puts it elsewhere. It can't help but do that. And the NCAA facilitated it.
Former Louisville star Jerry Eaves said as much in a sharply-worded Tweet Sunday night:
I guess, if you subscribe to the notion that any publicity is good publicity, that the NCAA Selection Committee should be happy tonight.
But in truth, they did themselves no favor in setting this game up right off the bat, and even worse, they did the players no favors, either.
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