Rick Pitino told The Associated Press on Tuesday that he knows his coaching days are most likely behind him. He still wants to be involved in basketball, where he's spent a lifetime.
"I think my time has passed, I really do," Pitino said of coaching again on Tuesday from the headquarters of The Associated Press in New York. "I'm young. I'm physically very young and mentally very young. I just think there are a lot of young reporters out there that won't let it go. The moment I'm hired, 'Why didn't school X look at this'?"
It's been nearly a year since Pitino was fired from Louisville after the school acknowledged it's men's program was being investigated as part of a federal corruption inquiry. He wrote a book Pitino: My Story to tell his side of the events that led to his ouster from the school where he coached for 16 years and led to a national title in 2013 that was vacated because of the scandals.
Pitino's book is partly a memoir of his time coaching at Providence, the New York Knicks, the Boston Celtics, Kentucky and Louisville. It also focuses on three aspects of the past few years, the 2015 sex scandal, the 2017 FBI investigation into the influence of shoe companies in college basketball and his eventual dismissal at Louisville.
"Some people will believe it, some people won't," Pitino said of his book. "That I don't care. All I care is that there's the truth in that book. I'm not passing the blame on anyone because it not only stops with me, but I'm out of coaching because of it. I paid the ultimate price for failure with people."
Pitino reiterated his contention Tuesday that he wasn't aware of potential payments to recruits to steer them to Louisville or having knowledge that a former basketball staffer hired escorts and strippers for sex parties with recruits and players.
Pitino, who turns 66 this month, plans to stay involved in the game, speaking to college teams and coaches around the country this year.
He said it
From Jim Vertuno of The Associated Press on Texas Coach Tom Herman using John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men to describe his football team.
"There's an informal new course at the University of Texas: American Literature with Tom Herman," Vertuno wrote.
"First on the syllabus: comparing a second straight loss to Maryland with the works of Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck.
"Texas, Herman said Monday, was like the simple but brutish Lennie Smalls from Steinbeck's classic Of Mice and Men. The Longhorns tried so hard to win they killed their chance to do it.
"Lennie wanted so badly to touch the rabbit and play with the rabbit, he squeezed it so hard he killed the rabbit," Herman said, noting he told linebacker Gary Johnson to read the book. "I know that seems maybe out there a little bit. I think that's what the first quarter was. We wanted it so badly, we got in our own way quite a bit."
"Herman mangled the analogy a bit. In the novel, Lennie kills a puppy, a mouse and a woman and only dreams of rabbits. And Lennie gets killed at the end.
"But at 7-7 over his first 14 games at Texas, too many more losses could prompt lectures on other Steinbeck titles, such as the The Grapes of Wrath or The Winter of Our Discontent.
This series is close
Peter King of NBCSports.com wrote about the classic Chicago Bears-Green Bay Packers rivalry in his weekly Football Morning in America column and pointed out how close the series is.
"They have met 196 times previously--194 in the regular season, twice in the playoffs. In those 196 games, this is the composite score:
"Green Bay 3,377, Chicago 3,377."
SPORTS QUIZ
What Texas university did Tom Herman coach at before arriving at Texas in 2017?
ANSWER
Houston.
Sports on 09/05/2018