Now that Rick Pitino’s out of commission, America’s filthiest, cheatingest, richest, college coach, John Calipari, struggles with the lamestream media:

Q. What is your reaction to the whole FBI investigation of college basketball? …

JOHN CALIPARI: Well, what’s out there right now is a black eye. But here is the thing for everybody here: I don’t want to come across as uneducated or dumb. None of us know where this thing’s going. So for me to really comment much on it, I mean, I don’t know where all this is going.

Obviously, what’s happened to this point isn’t good. At this point I don’t think me commenting without knowing all the facts is the right thing to do.

Q. How do you react to Mark Emmert’s statements yesterday? Do you think the culture of college basketball is so hopelessly corrupt that something has to change?

JOHN CALIPARI: I read the statement. I kind of liked it because at a point in there he mentioned about the students. At the end of the day, this is about the student-athletes.

I would say, again, this isn’t the format for me to go full boat in this. I would say if we make decisions about these kids, what’s right for these kids, we’re going to be right. If the NBA is worried about the NBA, and if the NCAA is worried about the NCAA, if each individual institution is just worried about themselves, and the last thing we think about are these kids, we’re going to make wrong decisions.

… Q. There’s a decent chance that next week Rick Pitino won’t be the coach at Louisville. Will you miss the rivalry in coaching against him?

JOHN CALIPARI: Look, it’s unfortunate, all the stuff that’s come down. But let’s talk about my team, please. Does anyone here have a question about my team, please?

Q. One more question about the FBI.

JOHN CALIPARI: Anybody have a question?

Q. Wait a minute. This is a Media Day, not Coach Day. I am entitled to ask a question.

JOHN CALIPARI: Ask it.

Q. You cannot answer it, fine.

JOHN CALIPARI: Ask it.

Q. The FBI reportedly has expanded into looking at Nike. Kentucky is a Nike school. What reassurance would you give your fan base, the Big Blue Nation, if they’re anxious about what this could mean?

JOHN CALIPARI: Again, you’re asking like you know something that I don’t know.

Q. That’s all I know is right there. If a fan would put two and two together…

JOHN CALIPARI: Wait a minute. We don’t know what you’re saying, if it’s true. Do we know if it’s true?

Q. It’s been reported.

JOHN CALIPARI: Oh, that makes it true.

I have no comment to it. I mean, we haven’t been contacted. The NCAA hasn’t contacted us. We’re going about our business of coaching this team.

How about a basketball question since it isn’t my day.

Did you click on that first Calipari link? The one that takes you to years of coverage of this vile, greedy, cynic? I think you should.

They’re in the comment section.

American football is already in serious decline, and I’m not sure a multimillionaire coach snorting coke with twenty dollar bills while telling his girlfriend he’d like to be “licking this off your pussy” (aka ‘Pulling a Puliafito’) is going to be good for business. I mean, maybe it will be. I don’t know.

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That’s but a trifle here.

One of the city’s largest corporate pillars has pulled out of the KFC Yum Center but denies that the decision is related to the University of Louisville’s serial dramas.

Spirits and wine company Brown-Forman canceled its luxury suite at the arena in May leaving behind about 315 square feet of prime real estate at the 22,000-seat downtown arena.

UD loves the little denial-dance the spokesperson for this massively profitable firm performs:

“We basically canceled it because of internal reasons that are kind of complicated to go into, but it had nothing to do with U of L.”

Uh-huh.

Arizona Football: Scottie Young Jr. Participating in All Team Activities Following Arrest for Domestic Violence

He can really beat the shit out of people!

The University of Arizona: Beautiful coach Rich Rodriguez. Beautiful team. A university sports legend in the making.

It was while reading his letter of termination, signed by the latest vague desperate interim nowhere man running the University of Louisville yet deeper into the ground. As she read the guy’s list of Rick’s evil evil deeds, which must be listed in this letter in order for the school to fire him with cause and get a forty-four million dollar discount on the transaction, the following exchange from Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virgina Woolf? began running through my head:

George: You can sit there in that chair of yours, you can sit there with the gin running out of your mouth, and you can humiliate me, you can tear me apart … ALL NIGHT… and that’s perfectly all right … that’s OK…

Martha: YOU CAN STAND IT!

George: I CANNOT STAND IT!

Martha: YOU CAN STAND IT!! YOU MARRIED ME FOR IT!!

George: (Quietly.). That is a desperately sick lie.

Martha here is ol’ Rick, hotly sought after by UL and paid seven million dollars a year because no one cheats their way to a championship like Rick; because Rick’s a winner who sees what he wants in a restaurant and fucks it right there on the table; he’s a guy whose recruitment coaches run whorehouses in basketball dormitories, and whose program pays the biggest bribes to high school players, and… Louisville married him for it!. It wanted a world of gin-pissed vulgarians and pin-striped dress for success hypocrites to keep the ball rolling, and it correctly identified and highly rewarded Pitino as THE man to provide it.

But now! Now, just because of a teeny DOJ and FBI crackdown, it’s suddenly ooh what a nasty unethical person you are! We cannot stand you!

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I’m afraid Rick is well within his rights, just as Martha is, to point out that these qualities and behaviors are exactly why UL fell so expensively in love with him in the first place. UL loved him so much that they let him sweep up most of the money available at the University of Louisville. It is impossible to find words to describe how much UL loved Rick Pitino, but it is quite possible to look at the immense money, power, and adoration they gladly gave him all those years. Because he won championships, and that’s all UL cares about and ever will care about because it’s Kentucky and it’s UL and that’s that. The next strutting multimillionaire fuckhead they bring on board to win championships will do exactly the same things to win them. Rick knows this, and has a right to feel aggrieved.

[University of Louisville Coach] Says Normalcy is Returning

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Corruption is now synonymous with top-tier college [sports] programs, but typically, lower level coaches, like an assistant coach, take most of the fault while the head coach and higher officials continue business as usual. [Rick] Pitino was set to serve a five-game suspension this season for [the University of] Louisville’s sex scandal last season. He escaped that investigation with only a suspension because he claimed to have been unaware of the actions of his staffer, Andre McGee.

Pitino’s reaction at being named in the [DOJ/FBI corruption] allegations, followed by statements of being shocked and unaware, won’t do him any favors. It has been amazing how NCAA coaches are constantly submerged in accusations of misconduct, but high-profile names like Pitino get away with measly suspensions. The next step for Pitino is to try to recoup any of the $40 million left on his contract at Louisville. Through his lawyer, he stated that he is owed all of it, but messy contract disputes are sure to ensue after his termination is final.

I believe his reputation would be too damaged for any basketball team to consider giving him another coaching job, but with these types of actions being so common in NCAA sports, another team might just overlook Pitino’s recent history.

The University of Louisville athletics program, rotten to the core, doesn’t even turn a profit. If you’re going to prostitute yourself in every possible way, as UL has done, at least make some money doing it. But of course the corruption on that campus involves giving its coaches obscene salaries, building pointless sports palaces, bribing recruits, and anything else twisted and rotten you can think of. ‘Fraid there’s no money left over after all that to give academics, and in fact athletics gets immense subsidies from this beyond-pathetic university. UD wonders how it feels for faculty and students to sacrifice for decades, only to discover that all the money they’ve had withheld has gone to world-historical douches like Rick Pitino, currently preparing to sue the in-the-credit-gutter school for $44 million.

But I guess knowing how much of that money goes to disgraced ex-AD Tom Jurich makes it all better!

“Over the past seven years, through a byzantine array of longevity and performance bonuses, base pay raises and tax subsidies, Jurich collected total compensation of $19,279,710, an average of $2.76 million per year.
“Last year, his taxable income — enriched by the vesting of a $1.8 million annuity plus $1.6 million from the university to pay his taxes on it — totaled $5.3 million.”

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The university budgeted less for its Biology ($3.3 million), English ($4 million), History ($2.4 million) and Mathematics ($3.5 million) departments, the [Louisville] Courier-Journal’s research showed, and his listed income was more than double that of the next-highest-paid AD, Ohio State’s Gene Smith ($1.98 million).

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Much of the remaining money, after Pitino and Jurich took what they took to drag the school through the mud, was allegedly snapped up by disgraced ex-UL president, James Ramsey, and his cronies.

I know! I know! Pick me! Pick me!

Uh, yes, UD?

Legitimate!!

A++, UD!  We’re proud of you!

[University of Louisville Athletic Director Tom] Jurich’s pay was essentially ill-gotten gains taken directly from players such as first-round NBA Draft pick Donovan Mitchell, whose television appeal and jersey sales produce the revenue. Yet Mitchell must be content with whatever crumbs the school illicitly tosses him? Throw open the market. Let’s see who clamors for Jurich’s jersey. Or whether the public would rather see him in prison clothes.

Anyone really setting out to chronicle the endless history of filthy athletics at the University of Miami would have to use as their model the 200,000 verse Indian epic. But given modern journalism’s space constraints, the task instead is to summarize as briefly as possible the long venerable ages of trashiness that are UM.

UD thinks Jerry Iannelli does a respectable job in this New Times piece, written in anticipation of an FBI indictment against UM’s basketball program.

SONG OF THE TRUSTEES

We’re off to dump Pitino
The god of our campus that was.
We knew he was a bit of a scuzz
If ever a scuzz there was.
And now that he’s going to jail one day
We’ve got to make sure he goes away
For cause for cause for cause for cause for cause!
Because of the terrible things he does.
We’re off to dump Pitino
The god of our campus that was.

Interim Louisville president Gregory Postel sent a letter to suspended coach Rick Pitino last month saying the FBI investigation into college basketball corruption clearly implicated him and the program…

“The allegations contained in the complaint … insinuate a scheme of fraud and malfeasance in the recruitment of student-athletes involving you and multiple members of your coaching staff in violation of federal law and NCAA Division I Bylaws.”

Motto of Auburn University: NEVER ENOUGH.

How is one of this country’s major jockshops going to shake off its latest thing – the FBI bribery fraud and conspiracy thing? Decades of institutional misconduct have done nothing to blunt their teams’ championship ways; and if Auburn’s long history of corruption has destroyed any vestige of academic integrity, who gives a fuck? It’s a jockshop.

Still, when the DOJ and FBI come calling, it’s definitely a problem, and UD‘s gonna tell you Auburn’s short and long game in dealing with it.

They have a brand new president – hard-landing macho man Steven Leath, who did a bang-up job at major jockshop Iowa State – and Leath’s short game (very short – it’s kind of a placeholder until the other conspirators confess) is to deny that the bribery fraud and conspiracy is the work of anyone other than one singular bad person.

But UD sees a far more interesting long game here, involving Alabama’s next senator, Roy Moore.

UD thinks that if Auburn sits tight and doesn’t do much of anything, Moore will step in and solve its latest problem for it. As a United States senator, he will launch an all-out attack on the FBI and DOJ and their apostate assault on the twin pillars of faith down south: football and basketball. With Roy on their side, the University of Alabama and Auburn University are going to be just fine.