The Louisville basketball scandal involving recruits, strippers, coaches and others hits closer to home in Minnesota because Rick Pitino's son, of course, is the Gophers' basketball coach -- and a big deal has been made since Day One of the ties between father and son.
Last week at the Big Ten's basketball media day, Richard Pitino, his father's associate head coach in 2011-12, said: "I don't think any staff in the country would know about that and turn a blind eye. To me, it just, it never happened."
With that in mind, here's a look at some of what's being said and written about the situation, with an eye toward whether the elder Pitino will be able to keep his job at Louisville.
Veteran sports columnist Rick Bozich, who now works for a Louisville TV station, thinks Pitino is finished: "No way that Pitino should survive this, an inevitability that I believe even U of L president Dr. James Ramsey realized more than a week ago when his first statement featured support for athletic director Tom Jurich but not Pitino. This wasn't one or two social mixers in the study lounge that went astray or a player flunking a drug or alcohol test or money in an express mail envelope. This is reportedly more than 20 incidents stretched over four years that turned the U of L basketball campus dormitory into something one former recruit said felt like a "strip club," according to a story at ESPN.com."
Bozich also wrote:"Pitino absolutely should have know something because this junk allegedly happened in a dormitory that the coach planned, funded and constructed to segregate his players from the general student population. You build a basketball dorm because you want more control, not less control. You build a basketball dorm because you want more information about what is going on with your players, not less information."
Read the full column here.
On his J. School blog, writer and TV personality Jason Whitlock writes that the real problem is not with Pitino. It's with escort Katina Powell, whose book brought the situation into public view.
Whitlock writes: "The answer to that question is really easy. Pitino is human. He has a family. There are competing demands on his time that take precedent over monitoring the sexual activity of young boys on a college campus. Parents can't track the sexual activity of the one or two children that live in their own home. The 42-year-old Powell preposterously argued that Pitino had to know about the stripper parties because his players, former players and assistant coaches are so loyal to him that they had to tell him. Loyalty in athletics works just the opposite. Loyalty would make them keep Pitino in the dark. I do not blame her for being clueless about sports culture. She is, judging by the ESPN story, something far worse than a prostitute. She's a mother who enlisted her three young daughters into the oldest profession and is now using their $100 encounters to sell a book."
