NEW YORK — Rick Pitino concedes he almost walked away from coaching after Louisville was upset in the first round of the NCAA Tournament last year by Morehead State.
“I thought about it but I wanted to finish out my contract,” Pitino said after winning his second Big East tournament title and 10th conference tournament title overall, 50-44, over Cincinnati at Madison Square Garden.
His contract runs through the 2016-17 season, meaning the kid from Bayville will be around to watch the Big East transform into something completely new and different in the coming years.
Now 59, Pitino has been associated on and off with the Big East since the very beginning.
He was an assistant to Jim Boeheim at Syracuse in the mid-1970s before that school became one of the founding members of the league in 1979.
He coached at Providence in the mid-80s, leading that program to a Final Four before taking over the Knicks.
And he has been at Louisville since 2001, long enough to see Miami, Boston College and Virginia Tech bolt the conference in the first wave of exits.
And now here he was again, like some kind of Zelig, coaching in the first Big East championship without a founding member.
No Syracuse. No Georgetown. No St. John’s.
Just two former Metro Conference — and later Conference USA — teams in Louisville and Cincinnati.
West Virginia is leaving the conference this year. By 2013, Syracuse and Pittsburgh will both be gone, replaced by Memphis and Temple.
At that point, the Big East will have added former Conference USA members Houston, SMU and UCF, too.
So perhaps it was somehow fitting that this championship — non-competitive until the final minutes and lacking in raucous crowd support — featured two teams that weren’t original Big East members.
“The Big East right now is taking on a whole new thing,” Pitino said.
“It’s disappointing that we’re losing some teams, but on the other hand, we are inviting. I think you guys will be excited about Temple, and I don’t know a whole lot about some of the other teams coming in, but it’s just a change. Everybody wants change nowadays. Let’s go to this league. You see Nebraska leave and go to this league, this one jumps to this league. It’s bizarre how everybody just leaves.”
Pitino has not been shy about taking shots at Syracuse’s decision to leave or at UConn for considering leaving.
And Louisville itself has reportedly been targeted by the Big 12.
But Pitino is a New York City guy who seems to genuinely love the Big East and want to honor the memory of the late Dave Gavitt.
He took his players on a tour of his neighborhood Saturday, telling them all about his days with the Knicks.
“I preached to them about what the Garden is and took them by where I live and told them what is what all about,” he said. “I told them about all the pro games that I coached, with sweeping the Sixers, losing to Michael [Jordan] in the second round and their eyes are as big as Christmas balls because they love hearing those names.”
Next year will be the last year of Boeheim and Syracuse and the remnants of the old Big East.
Then times will give way to a new era, one of the Memphis’s and Houstons and UCFs and SMUs.
But Pitino says he isn’t going anywhere.
“I will be here till they get rid of me,” he said.
Or until Louisville, like the other schools before them, heads off to another conference.
Photo: New York Times
