Sporting News Player of the Year: 1 (Darrell Griffith, 1980)
AP All-Americans: 13 (last = Jordan Nwora, 2020)
ACC Player of the Year: 0
Metro Player of the Year: 8(last = Clifford Rozier, 1994)
Missouri Valley Player of the Year: 2(Junior Bridgeman, 1974 & 1975)
Louisville head coaches:
Coach
Tenure
Record
Conf. Titles
NCAA Apps.
Nat. Champ
Kenny Payne
2022-Pres
0-0
0
0
0
Mike Pegues (int.)
2022
7-11
0
0
0
Chris Mack
2018-22
68-37
0
1
0
David Padgett
2017-18
22-14
0
0
0
Rick Pitino **
2001-17
293-143
4
9
0
Denny Crum
1971-2001
675-295
15
22
2
Howard Stacey (int. )
0
Harold Church/Walter Casey
1943-44
10-10
–
0
0
John Heldman
1940-42
9-24
–
0
0
Lawrence Apitz
1936-40
10-52
–
0
0
C.V. Money
1932-36
46-40
–
–
–
Edward Weber
1930-32
20-18
–
–
–
Tom King
1925-30
44-31
–
–
–
Fred Enke
1923-25
14-20
–
–
–
John T. O’Rouke
1921-22
1-13
–
–
–
Jimmie Powers
1920-21
3-8
–
–
–
Tuley Brucker
1919-20
6-5
–
–
–
Earl Ford
1918-19
7-4
–
–
–
Ed Bowman
1915-18
11-7
–
–
–
William Gardiner
1911-12
0-3
–
–
–
Key: Conf. These appearances were in the NAIA Tournament
** Listed records and accomplishments do not include wins or appearances later vacated by the NCAA.
Louisville’s vacated national championship is real, no matter the NCAA
Louisville is college basketball’s national champion for 2013. That is a known fact. Everyone watched the games. Louisville won six in a row in the NCAA tournament, and all of them were nationally televised. Their “One Shining Moment”video is still on YouTube, along with many other highlights from the spring of Russ Smith and Peyton Siva.
The NCAA says otherwise. It’s said otherwise since June 2017, when its Committee on Infractions ruled that Louisville staffers had bought strippers and sex workers for players and recruits. The NCAA doesn’t love that.
The worst sentence for Louisville was already self-imposed: A postseason ban in 2016, when then-coach Rick Pitino had another contending team. The others were mostly minor: probation, four scholarship losses across four years, a five-ACC game suspension for Pitino, and the vacating of wins — a standard mechanism of NCAA justice that doesn’t mean anything beyond NCAA record books — that included the 2013 tournament.
The vacated wins are only in the news again now because Louisville’s never-gonna-happen appeal has now officially failed.
The NCAA takes away wins for all kinds of violations.
Louisville is the first basketball team to lose an NCAA-recognized national title to sanctions. But there have been big-time seasons wiped off the books before in many sports. John Calipari’s UMass had a Final Four run vacated in 1996 after the NCAA ruled center Marcus Camby had received gifts from agents. In football, USC lost its 2004 title, and the NCAA recently erased Notre Dame’s trip to the BCS Championship in 2012 over an academic issue.
The NCAA has vacated wins in cases of horrible crimes that had little to do with on-field competitive advantages (like Penn State’s sexual abuse scandal). It’s done the same in cases where it’s found programs to be breaking rules to make themselves better, like the Notre Dame and Ole Miss football programs recently.
But as a practical matter, the stripping of wins means almost nothing.
It’s a real horror for fans who care about Wikipedia tables ...
— Scott Utterback (@Utterback13) February 20, 2018
... or NCAA record books, which are kept in PDFs that almost no one reads.
It’s not that big a deal to most people, least of all the players involved:
Still got this fat ass ring which means my guys definitely won a chip, if I’m not mistaken of course.
— Kevin Ware (@AirWare5) February 20, 2018
It might be a slight inconvenience for people who don’t like to argue about real champions. College basketball has a 68-team tournament and thus isn’t accustomed to widespread fighting about who actually won a given year’s title. But, folks, college football has done that for almost its entire history, and UCF’s doing it right now. Most college hoops fans are also college football fans, so needing to argue for a deserving champion isn’t some kind of new thing. Nobody is really in charge of any college sport, anyway.
Maybe vacating wins feels like karmic retribution for coaches and administrators who have done wrong. Louisville’s an easy target, given its recent firings of Pitino and athletic director Tom Jurich amid an entirely separatescandal, that one involving corruption and the FBI. But their reputations aren’t any more tattered now than they would’ve been had the title not been vacated. Unless Louisville tries to recoup bonus money paid to Pitino for winning it all, how’s he even being punished?
The NCAA has some tools to really sting people it thinks did wrong. It can ban teams from tournaments and take away scholarship slots, making them weaker for years. It can slap show-cause penalties on the people in charge, making it almost impossible for them to find work in college sports. It can even ban teams from competing for years at a time.
Those punishments aren’t the same as taking a team’s wins away. The main difference is that all those other sanctions exist in the real world, not the NCAA’s revised reality.
Teams could just tell the NCAA to shove it, but they don’t.
Louisville isn’t doing that. No one does. The Cardinals are mad as hell, but their banner came down almost immediately upon losing their appeal. No team can tell the NCAA what to think, and it can’t control what goes on Wikipedia unless it’s deeply committed.
What’s the NCAA really going to do to the team that refuses to take down a banner or accept the vacating of wins? The organization considers “reckless indifference to the NCAA constitution and bylaws” to be a Level I violation, the most serious kind. It’s in the same tier as paying recruits or, for another example, getting them prostitutes.
There’s a chance that the NCAA wouldn’t do anything to a school that defied it and flaunted a vacated title forever. But even a slight risk of incurring a real punishment isn’t worth it, because the NCAA ignoring wins everyone knows you have definitely isn’t one.
Two Ukrainians will play in March Madness. But there will be no Duke, Kentucky and Louisville - for the first time in 45 years
The most sincere and unpredictable basketball on the planet is already here.
The March Madness, the Big Dance, or, officially, the U.S. National Collegiate Division I Championship (three in total) is the best basketball tournament on the planet.
Where he lacks quality, he takes on quantity - both participating teams and fans. Where there is a lack of entertainment, intrigue and unpredictability appear - no March Madness is complete without a couple of deafening sensations, and from time to time there are basketball Cinderella stories with a happy ending in the form of the Final Four (Loyola Chicago - 2018 and Virginia Commonwealth - 2011 - the most recent and memorable examples).
Virginia Commonwealth players celebrate reaching the 2011 Final Four
The Big Dance is also a global review of young talents who will soon strengthen basketball clubs from all over the world, from NBA giants to Ukrainian Super League teams. For some, elimination matches are the last chance to get into the pool of NBA draft prospects, for others it is an opportunity to show at least a little bit of themselves in order to launch a career in some European championship.
Add to this countless unique stories, storylines and the ability of Americans to put any sports product in the brightest possible wrapping - and we get a tournament that simply cannot leave anyone indifferent. TV ratings confirm this: the final match of "Madness" - 2019(Last year the tournament was not held at all due to the coronavirus pandemic) gathered almost 20 million people at the screens.
The NBA Finals between Milwaukee and Toronto, on average, had the same audience - and after all, its outcome was closely watched not only in the USA, but also in Canada too. There were cases when students with a margin did professionals for spectator interest. Not to mention the fact that in the pre-Covid years, the Final Four consistently gathered 70-75 thousand people in the stands.
March Madness Final Four at NRG Stadium in Houston
We tell you the main facts that you need to know for a comfortable immersion in the atmosphere of the "Big Dance" - 2021, which started on Thursday, March 18, with the fights of the so-called "First Four". The participants of which, usually non-named, included two well-known basketball programs at once - Michigan State (Magic Johnson and Draymond Green studied there) and the University of California at Los Angeles (alma mater of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Bill Walton, Russell Westbrook and almost hundreds of NBA players).
68 entrants, difficult selection and no room for error
The main reason the US Collegiate Championships are called "Madness" is because of the elimination bracket. To win the title, you need to win six matches in a row, regardless of fatigue, injuries and the strength of opponents. One single bad day (the failure of snipers, the leader's problems with personal remarks, and the opponent's courage too) can easily cross out everything that the basketball players and the coaching staff have been working on for a season or even several years. And, by tradition, at least one major surprise occurs every round.
In 2018, it got to the point where the 16th seed (usually the champion of a very weak conference) for the first time in the history of the Big Dance beat the top seed of the region - that is, the top contender for the final victory. The guys from the University of Maryland/Baltimore County, who created a fantastic sensation, were eliminated in the next round, but their names were immortalized. Nothing is officially impossible in Madness now.
University of Maryland/Baltimore County basketball players just beat Virginia to create the biggest sensation in Madness history
There are 68 participants in the national championship in total. 60 teams get places in the main draw, and eight more play an additional match in the "First Four" for the right to get into it. Usually it's the underdogs of the Madness who don't see much beyond the first two rounds, but in 2021 we got the Michigan State vs. UCLA supersign with the iconic Tom Izzo on the Spartans coaching bridge and 13 league titles for two.
Almost half of the participants of the "Big Dance" (in 2021 it is 31 teams) are formed by the winners of their conferences. There are many of them in the first division of the NCAA, and educational institutions are united not only on a geographical basis - but also, for example, according to priority sports for the program or based on the desire to “cut” with top-level rivals every week. But even if the conference is very weak, and its member universities are betting on, say, American football, its champion still gets a pass to Madness.
The rest of the participants are selected by a special jury, armed with complex statistical techniques - absolutely everything is taken into account, from the complexity of the schedule in the regular season to the effectiveness of defense and attack. The same jury conducts the seeding: all teams are ranked from the first to the 68th, and based on this, according to the principles approved by the NCAA, the playoff bracket is formed.
Another blank March Madness 2021 grid on the facade of a hotel in Indianapolis
There is no limit on the number of representatives from one conference in March Madness. In 2021, for example, nine teams at once will be delegated to the tournament bracket by the Big Ten conference, the oldest and most authoritative in US college sports, and 38 out of 68 participants are assigned to the six strongest conferences, while 22 send only champions to the tournament.
Shrinking geography and coronavirus restrictions
In previous years, 13 arenas in six cities were used for the March Madness. The "First Four" have traditionally played in Dayton since their inception. Most of the matches were held in four cities from different regions of the United States (which is why the quarter-finals of the "Big Dance" are often called the regional finals, although the connection with geography is very arbitrary here: Connecticut can reach the "Final Four" from the West, and Indiana from the South). The national champion was determined at one of the largest football stadiums in the country.
Due to the pandemic, established principles had to be changed: in 2021, absolutely all March Madness matches will be held in Indiana. The base city of the tournament will be Indianapolis, where all available arenas will be used - from university halls (it sounds scary, but they all exceed any indoor arena in Ukraine in terms of capacity) to the home arena of the Indianapolis Colts NFL club (for holding matches of the first and second rounds two separate basketball courts will be mounted on it).
Butler University's home arena, hosting part of the March Madness 2021 matches
The issue with the audience was decided at the last moment in favor of the fans - but they can nominally fill no more than 25% of the seats in the stands. Their real number will be even less: from a quarter of the capacity of a particular arena, the number of people involved in each particular match, including players, coaches, referees, team representatives and technical staff, will be taken away. Therefore, creating a unique atmosphere in the stands, which in Madness is closer to European football than to US professional sports leagues, will not work in 2021.
The absence of several notable favorites
The Big Dance 2021 will be special also because several top programs that even those who are interested in basketball have heard of have not been included in the number of its participants. For the first time since 1976, the March Madness will not feature teams from Duke, Kentucky, and Louisville at the same time, with 15 titles for three (the record for one program is 11 UCLA wins, most of which came at the time of the legendary John Wooden).
Each of these failures has its own history. John Calipari's Wildcats just had a terrible season, ending it with a negative balance of wins and losses, and the plans of the Cardinals and the Blue Devils were decently spoiled by the coronavirus. Louisville battled contagion for most of the regular season, and Duke had to pull out of the conference championship ahead of the quarterfinals due to positive tests on the team - although only a victory guaranteed Mike Krzyszewski's guys participation in March Madness.
The Blue Devils, now represented in the NBA by nearly 30 players including Kyrie Irving, Jason Tatum, Brandon Ingram and Zion Williamson, have ended a fantastic streak of 24 consecutive Big Dance appearances. The era of the 74-year-old Krzyszewski, who has broken almost every possible NCAA coaching record, won five Olympics and has already been inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame twice, seems to be coming to an end.
Mike Krzyszewski's Duke was not included in March Madness for the first time since 1995.
Both the jury that seeded the participants and the bookmakers consider the Gonzaga University team to be the main contender for the victory in Madness. Mark Few's boys, now in their 22nd season, have put together a perfect championship with 26 wins in 26 games played, and the Bulldogs have some very interesting prospects in the lineup. Here plays one of the favorites of the next NBA draft, playmaker Jaylen Suggs (scouts compare him with Jason Kidd - primarily in terms of size and defensive skills) and forward Cory Kispert, who converted more than 44% of his three-point shots and got into the first symbolic team of the season in AR version.
Gonzaga has been in the pool of favorites for years, but she still doesn’t have a championship title - and there was only one Final Four under Few, in 2017, when the team lost the decisive match to North Carolina. It will not be easy this time either: in the third round, the Bulldogs will face Virginia, who won the previous Madness.
Two Ukrainians, but without much chance of success
Ukrainian representation in the NCAA is quite large. These are more than ten players, among them - a very promising big man born in 2003 Pavel Dzyuba and defender Mikhail Yagodin and center Vladimir Markovetsky known for playing for youth teams of various ages.
However, their teams did not make it to the Big Dance, which can be called a surprise, except in the case of Dziuba's Arizona State. In November, both AP and the coaches ranked the Sun Devils among the 25 strongest college teams in the US, but they only lasted a couple of weeks in the rankings - and in the middle of the season they went on a six-game losing streak, ruining anyone who wants to play in March Madness.
Pavel Dzyuba
However, we will have someone to keep an eye on in the coming days. The 11th seed in the conditional southern region was received by the University of Utah State defender Maxim Shulga, the son of the famous Ukrainian referee Boris Shulga, who also caused the showdown between BC Kyiv and Azovmash in the Super League and hung the whistle on a nail in 2018. Having received a basic basketball education in Spanish academies, the 18-year-old moved across the ocean before the start of this season and is considered a rookie by NCAA rules (a standard student basketball career lasts four seasons).
Shulga spends little time on the court, but appears on it regularly - the defender took part in 20 out of 28 Aggies matches, playing an average of just over seven minutes. Of course, it’s not necessary to talk about serious statistics (only 1.7 points and 1.9 rebounds with 34 percent shooting from the field), but even by the standards of student basketball, Maxim is very young, and he still has everything ahead of him.
Utah State itself is the most international team. Its leader is the Portuguese center Nimayas Keta, and together with the Ukrainian Shulga, the Poles Simon Zapala and Cuba Karwowski, the Australian Sean Bairstow, the Canadian Liam McChesney and the Russian Zakhar Vedishchev (son of Lokomotiv-Kuban President Andrey Vedishchev) play in it. In the first round, Eggs will meet with the finalists of the previous “Madness” from Texas Tech, and in the second, if they win, Arkansas will face the top prospect of the 2021 draft Moses Moody.
Maxim Shulga
The second representative of Ukraine in the "Big Dance" is 20-year-old big man Dima Zdor, whose Grand Canyon made it to the national championship for the first time in its history. A native of the Crimean Yalta has not yet played for any national team (last year, the last year when the striker had the opportunity to play for youth teams, all European championships were canceled due to a pandemic), and Zdor spends his third season in the NCAA.
He started his student career at Weber State University, the very one that introduced Damien Lillard to the world and where Joel Bolomboy got into the NBA draft, but after two years in the Wildcats jersey, he decided to transfer to another educational institution. Zdor chose the Grand Canyon because he knew head coach Bryce Drew and members of his staff. In Arizona, the big man, in his own words, was helped with advice and his own experience by Alexei Len, who played five seasons in the NBA for Phoenix. However, everything went wrong.
The third season in the NCAA Zdor was even worse than the debut - and much weaker than the second in Weber State. The forward did not have to miss a year due to a transfer from one university to another (such a scenario was more than real, but in the end the association allowed him to play right away). But instead of progress under the guidance of "their" mentor, we got a total of 58 minutes in 12 matches and exits to the court mostly only in "garbage" minutes.
Dima Zdor
The competition in the front line of the Grand Canyon turned out to be too serious for the Ukrainian. Dane Osbjorn Midtgard and Italian Alessandro Lever, who are three and two years older, respectively, became the team's leading scorers, leading it to the first-ever conference victory at the NCAA Division I level. The big man will only be able to count on adequate playing time next season. Both Europeans are seniors, final year students, and this academic year is the last one for them in student basketball.
The jury gave the Grand Canyon the 15th seed and sent it to the conditional western region for a date with Iowa, a powerful team from the top Big Ten conference, included in the bookmaker's quotes in the top ten contenders for victory in Madness. The victory of Antelops over such an opponent in the first round will be a real miracle. However, in the "Big Dance" absolutely everything is possible, and even upsets in such pairs.
The Grand Canyon starts in the national championship on March 20 - a day after Utah State Shulgi. On the territory of Ukraine, a significant part of the March Madness matches will be broadcast by the Viasat Sport TV channel.
Breaking news, the best photos and the brightest highlights of Ukrainian and world basketball in our social networks
Photo: NY Times, USA Today, The Ringer, Jamie Squire/Getty Images, GSU Univercity/gculopes.com and FIBA
Career | NOVEMBER 2022
Facts about Richard Andrew Pitino
Full name:
Richard Pitino
0106 He is a Hall of Famer and national title coach.
What is Rick Pitino famous for?
Basketball coach.
Helped win Kentucky to win the NCCA National Championship.
Rick Pitino: age, biography, parents, family, siblings, childhood, ethnicity
Rick Pitino was born Richard Andrew Pitino on September 18, 1952 in New York, New York. He was born and raised in New York. But Rick didn't share any information about his siblings and parents . He was interested in basketball from an early age and was the captain of his high school basketball team at Saint Dominic's High School. Rick holds American citizenship but his ethnicity is unknown.
Education details
He went to UMass Amherst in 1970 and played as a standout defenseman on the Minutemen basketball team. In addition, Rick managed his passing team for both juniors and seniors. Graduated from university at 1974 year.
All About Rick Pitino's Career
He originally worked as a graduate student assistant at the University of Hawaii in 1974. He moved to full-time assistant a year later, eventually serving as Hawaii head coach for the 1975-76 season.
Later in 1978, he was hired as the head coach of Boston University. Before his arrival, the team performed very poorly. He helped change the team's fortunes for the better and led them to their first NCAA appearance in 24 years.
Sabbath observance
He then became an assistant coach with the New York Knicks under Hubie Brown in the 1983-85 seasons. In 1985, he became the head coach of Providence College, whose team was not performing well. Within two years, he led them to the Final Four.
In 1989, he was chosen to coach at Kentucky. When he joined the team, the aftermath of a scandal involving their former coach, Eddie Sutton, was reeling.
Pitino worked hard to get the team's reputation back and led them to the Final Four in the 1993 NCAA tournament. He also helped the team win the national title at the 1996 NCAA Tournament.
Louisville defeated Boise, Oklahoma and Tennessee to reach the top eight in the 2008 NCAA Tournament. However, they were defeated by North Carolina.
anastasia dance
NCAA Coach
He is the only coach in NCAA history to lead three different teams to the NCAA Final Four. He won the NABC Coach of the Year award presented by the National Basketball Coaches Association at 19'87 while coaching Providence.
Rumors and Controversy:
He was extorted in 2009 along with Karen Kunagin Cipher, demanding money and cars from Rick after the couple had a sexual encounter in a Louisville restaurant in 2003 and became pregnant. However, Rick claimed that the sex was consensual and Karen was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2011.
Rick Pitino: net worth
Rick estimated net worth $45 million and earned about $7.7 million as a Louisiana head coach in 2017.
new year dance
Is Rick Pitino married? Wife, Children, Marriage
He Married Joan Minardi, April 3, 1976. He and his wife have five children: Michael, Christopher, Richard (Rick Pitino Jr.), Ryan and Jacqueline. They also had another son, Daniel, who died in 1987 of congenital heart failure at the age of six months.
In his memory, the couple established the Daniel Pitino Foundation, through which they raised millions of dollars for children in need.
He lost his best friend and brother-in-law Billy Minardi in the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Broadway Dance Center reviews
Favorite things:
Artist: Pitbull
Item: History
Rick Pitino: height, weight, eye color
900 has is 6 feet tall and weighs about 75 kg. He also has light brown hair and brown eyes.
Is Rick Pitino active on social media?
He has about 63 thousand followers on Twitter but he is not on Facebook and Instagram.
)
These appearances were in the NAIA Tournament
The others were mostly minor: probation, four scholarship losses across four years, a five-ACC game suspension for Pitino, and the vacating of wins — a standard mechanism of NCAA justice that doesn’t mean anything beyond NCAA record books — that included the 2013 tournament. 
It’s done the same in cases where it’s found programs to be breaking rules to make themselves better, like the Notre Dame and Ole Miss football programs recently.
But, folks, college football has done that for almost its entire history, and UCF’s doing it right now. Most college hoops fans are also college football fans, so needing to argue for a deserving champion isn’t some kind of new thing. Nobody is really in charge of any college sport, anyway.
It can even ban teams from competing for years at a time.
But even a slight risk of incurring a real punishment isn’t worth it, because the NCAA ignoring wins everyone knows you have definitely isn’t one. 
There were cases when students with a margin did professionals for spectator interest. Not to mention the fact that in the pre-Covid years, the Final Four consistently gathered 70-75 thousand people in the stands. 
One single bad day (the failure of snipers, the leader's problems with personal remarks, and the opponent's courage too) can easily cross out everything that the basketball players and the coaching staff have been working on for a season or even several years. And, by tradition, at least one major surprise occurs every round. 
Usually it's the underdogs of the Madness who don't see much beyond the first two rounds, but in 2021 we got the Michigan State vs. UCLA supersign with the iconic Tom Izzo on the Spartans coaching bridge and 13 league titles for two. 
The same jury conducts the seeding: all teams are ranked from the first to the 68th, and based on this, according to the principles approved by the NCAA, the playoff bracket is formed. 
The national champion was determined at one of the largest football stadiums in the country. 
Therefore, creating a unique atmosphere in the stands, which in Madness is closer to European football than to US professional sports leagues, will not work in 2021. 
On the territory of Ukraine, a significant part of the March Madness matches will be broadcast by the Viasat Sport TV channel. 
But Rick didn't share any information about his siblings and parents . He was interested in basketball from an early age and was the captain of his high school basketball team at Saint Dominic's High School. Rick holds American citizenship but his ethnicity is unknown. 
However, they were defeated by North Carolina. 
He and his wife have five children: Michael, Christopher, Richard (Rick Pitino Jr.), Ryan and Jacqueline. They also had another son, Daniel, who died in 1987 of congenital heart failure at the age of six months. 
