Rick Pitino’s improbable path back to college basketball’s spotlight

When the NCAA men’s college basketball tournament begins Thursday, one of its most unexpected national title contenders will be led by a coach whose return to prominence once might have felt inconceivable.

Eight years after scandals ended Rick Pitino’s tenure at one of the country’s most successful programs and led him to find work halfway around the world, the 72-year-old has a chance to stand atop the college game again thanks to No. 2 seed St. John’s (30-4).

It is the record sixth college that has made the tournament under Pitino, who had already made history as the first to win a national championship at two schools and advance to a Final Four with three.

Five decades into his career, at a time when many of Pitino’s coaching contemporaries have long since retired, Pitino did the opposite. He not only wanted to get back to the college game, he was willing to take a circuitous route to get there. And despite returning to a college system that has undergone seismic changes — from allowing players to profit off their name, image and likeness, to hopping between schools without penalty via the transfer portal — Pitino has thrived.

“I really don’t believe in the word ‘redemption’ because those who judge you really don’t know the facts,” Pitino said Monday on ESPN’s Pat McAfee Show. “They really don’t know either way, innocent or guilty. They don’t know it.”

Amid a celebration inside New York’s Madison Square Garden last week after St. John’s won its first Big East tournament title in a quarter-century, St. John’s star RJ Luis, the conference’s player of the year, who transferred in via the portal to play for Pitino, told reporters to direct credit toward the septuagenerian on the sideline.

“Coach P is the mastermind behind all of this,” Luis said. “I mean, it’s truly special.”

The scene would have been difficult to imagine in 2017, when Pitino was fired by the University of Louisville following an FBI investigation that alleged the school had arranged payments for the family of a recruit. It stained his job prospects. Pitino, in 2020, told a radio show in Louisville that he had been “sort of been blackballed out of the business for two and a half years,” and while he maintained that he was innocent of wrongdoing, “I was the leader and I deserved to be fired.” (In 2022, an independent review process ended the case by giving only light penalties to Louisville and none to Pitino.)

In 2018, Louisville was forced to vacate the 2013 national championship it won under Pitino following an NCAA investigation into allegations a school staffer arranged for sex and strippers with recruits.

“I wasn’t exiled away, but nobody really wanted to deal with hiring me at that point,” Pitino said in 2023. He could have retired. He had been college basketball’s highest-paid coach, and was already enshrined in the Naismith Basketball Hall of Fame. Yet Pitino, a self-described “basketball junkie,” could not stay away from the sideline, even if it meant taking jobs far outside his usual spotlight.

In 2018 he trekked to Athens, where he coached in Europe’s top professional league. Two years later, he returned to his native New York to coach Iona, a college so small its entire enrollment would fill less than a fifth of Pitino’s former Louisville arena.

He declared, upon his hiring at Iona, that the job would be his last.

“The reason I said that is, who is going to hire a 70-year-old?” he said in 2023. It turned out that leading Iona to two NCAA tournaments and winning more games (27) in 2022-23, his last season there, than the program had in any of the 25 seasons before made Pitino an attractive candidate for St. John’s. The school, like Pitino, was a former power that had lost its shine. It had qualified for the NCAA tournament 20 times in 26 years before 2002, but just three since.

Pitino, with a career .713 winning percentage, has won everywhere since he first became an interim head coach at Hawaii in 1976. Among active Division I coaches, Pitino’s 37 seasons as a head coach rank third and his 761 career victories rank sixth. Those totals would be even larger if not for Pitino’s six seasons coaching the NBA’s Knicks and Celtics, and the 123 victories vacated from 2010 through 2015 due to NCAA penalties.