Rick Pitino took a shot at Kentucky when talking about the Louisville sex scandal during an interview.
Pitino joined ESPN’s “Mike and Mike in the Morning” and talked about his Cardinals not playing in the postseason this year due to a self-imposed ban as penalty for the sex scandal. Pitino once again expressed shock over what happened.
“Well I’m going to tell them that — and it will sound a little bizarre to them — I’ve been a believer in these rules for over 30 years,” Pitino told the hosts. “Matter of fact, people call me a little bit of a micromanager. We’ve had the highest GPA now in three different conferences every year. We get after our guys academically … we run an extremely disciplined program so there’s a tremendous contradiction of this going on. And to say it breaks my heart would be putting it mildly … if I could just get Andre McGee in a room for 10 minutes I’d say, ‘Why? Why would you do this? What purpose did it serve? We didn’t need this to get recruits.’
“You know we’re not Kentucky where we’re recruiting the one-and-dones. We’re recruiting the Russ Smiths of the world. He’s a two-star athlete who becomes a first team college All-American. Gorgui Dieng, starting for the Minnesota Timberwolves wasn’t ranked in the top 75 … so we have a different way we recruit and it didn’t make any sense what was going on. How these women infiltrated our program was very disturbing to me.”
Right, Louisville’s not Kentucky because they’re not going after the one-and-dones. They shouldn’t have to lure recruits using strippers and sex, because they’re going for a different type of player, according to Pitino.
Can you believe the nerve of this guy? His program gets busted for throwing sex parties for recruits and then he tries to claim some sort of moral high ground over Kentucky? Are you kidding? Get real, Rick. You can’t have it both ways. And for what it’s worth, Katina Powell says she thinks Pitino knew about the parties.
Transcription via For the Win
