Defiant Pitino: Resigning is ‘the cowardly way out’

A defiant Rick Pitino says resigning as the head basketball coach at Louisville wouldn’t accomplish anything.

“I don’t know what resigning would accomplish,” Pitino told host Terry Meiners on WHAS-840 in Louisville this week. “I think that’s the cowardly way out … What does it do for the program if the head coach just runs away?”

By the end of the interview, Pitino had conceded that he would resign if that’s what Louisville President James Ramsey wanted.

“If I get the feeling that he wants [me to resign], I’d pack my bags and leave,” the Hall of Fame coach said.

It may not bode well for Pitino that Ramsey issued a statement saying he “fully supports” Louisville AD Tom Jurich, but that did not mention Pitino by name.

“[He] didn’t think enough to mention me, but that’s something I can’t control,” Pitino said.

Pitino is facing the second sex scandal of his tenure at Louisville as the NCAA is looking into allegations that came out of the book “Breaking Cardinal Rules,” which maintain that former Louisville basketball player and graduate assistant Andre McGee hired strippers and prostitutes to dance for and have sex with Louisville players, recruits and, in some cases, the recruits’ fathers during the period 2010-14.

This week, CBSSports.com and ESPN were among those adding reporting to the scandal. CBSSports.com reported that former Louisville recruit Ja’Quan Lyle, now a freshman guard at Ohio State, confirmed the “gist” of the book’s allegations to NCAA investigators.

ESPN.com also quoted an anonymous former Louisville player as saying strippers came to the dorms “once or two times,” but said they only danced and nothing more.

“An educated person can’t think he’s going to get a recruit by strippers coming in. I don’t get it,” Pitino said in the radio interview.

Meantime, former Pitino lieutenants like current Cincinnati coach Mick Cronin have come to Pitino’s defense, saying there’s no way he was aware of the alleged goings on and expressing anger that McGee did this to his former boss.

“If some people were involved in that, I guarantee you they did everything they could to make sure (Pitino) didn’t know, because he would’ve fired them,” said Cronin, who was Pitino’s associate head coach at Louisville from 2001-03, according to the Courier-Journal. “This whole thing is heartbreaking. I’d be lying if I didn’t say I had some anger that some people maybe have put him in this bad situation.”

Depending on what the NCAA finds, Pitino could end up getting a punishment similar to his fellow Hall of Fame coaches Jim Boeheim and Larry Brown, both of whom are slated to face nine-game suspensions for their NCAA violations.

Meantime, Pitino and his staff continue to recruit throughout the scandal. They hosted guard Andrew Jones and forward T.J. Leaf last weekend and were recently in to see bigs Kaspar Christiansen and Leroy Butts of Elev8 Academy in Florida.