And so it wasn't all that surprising when a USA Today columnist called for Pitino to resign Tuesday after escort/author Katina Powell spilled her guts to ESPN's Outside the Lines and sounded credible and, in a way, logical.
“How could Rick not know?” Powell remarked in breaking her silence.
With public pressure mounting, Pitino — who pleaded for McGee to come forward and tell the truth — probably should step away rather than wait for whatever punishment the NCAA hands down.
Academic scandals landed coaching legends Jim Boeheim and Larry Brown in hot water with the NCAA recently. Both received nine-game suspensions. What’s alleged to have gone on at Louisville would seem many times worse than anything that took place at Syracuse or SMU.
Louisville athletic director Tom Jurich publicly supported Pitino on Tuesday, and I'm sure Louisville fans will stick by their coach. But what a stain on the school and its brand.
This is no run-of-the-mill program, of course. It's one of the nation's elite, on and off the court. According to a Forbes report in March, Louisville was college basketball's most valuable "franchise" for the fourth straight year, judged to be worth $38.3 million.
Columnist writes a ‘Dear Johnny’ letter
Last week’s domestic dispute involving Browns quarterback Johnny Manziel and his soused girlfriend won’t be going away anytime soon, it appears. Not with every columnist and talking head in the country seemingly weighing in on it.
Here's a column from Terry Pluto on Cleveland.com that asks what Manziel plans to do with the rest of his life.
It’s actually a letter that begins: “Dear Johnny Manziel.”
“No one — not the police, the league or the Browns — can make Johnny be good. Only you can do that,” Pluto writes. “After 11 weeks in a rehabilitation center for some sort of addiction problem that has never been made public, you were out drinking?”
Pluto goes on to say he’s familiar with behavior such as Manziel’s from his work with addicted inmates in his prison ministry and says it’s now up to Manziel to admit he still has a problem with alcohol and do something about it.
The Browns would probably appreciate that, too. Or they could just cut him loose, as former Steelers coach Bill Cowher advised recently.
UD coach unfazed by favorable forecast
In case there was any doubt, University of Dayton basketball coach Archie Miller made it abundantly clear what he thinks of preseason polls after the Flyers were picked to win the Atlantic 10 Conference.
“Honestly I pay no attention to any preseason stuff,” Miller told reporters at A-10 media day in Brooklyn, N.Y. “It does not mean a lot in the grand scheme of things.”
Not even Dyshawn Pierre’s likely absence for the first 10 games could dissuade the panel of coaches and media members from anointing the Flyers.
They received 12 of 27 first-place votes and a total of 352 points, followed in the predictions by Rhode Island (347 points) and Davidson (329).
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