April 7, five days after his team had lost to Illinois in its first Final Four appearance since 1986, University of Louisville men's basketball coach Rick Pitino said of the coming season: "We're still going to be good. We're still going to be Louisville, a top-20 basketball team. We will never slip from that again." This season they have.
The Cardinals are 13th in the 16-team Big East Conference with a 3-7 league record, and only the top 12 teams advance to the league tournament in Madison Square Garden. Their Ratings Percentage Index ranking is No. 64, meaning it would take a dramatic late-season run for them to secure an NCAA Tournament at-large berth.
Such a run is not out of the question, but even Pitino termed it "more possible than probable."
How did this happen? Most assumed that Pitino, in his fifth season and coming off a Final Four, had left the program's days of struggling far in the past. The Cards were ranked No. 7 in the preseason.
Instead, a combination of factors has put them in jeopardy of becoming the first Final Four team not to make the NCAA Tournament the next season since Marquette did it three years ago.
Pitino, who stressed the team's potential in early public appearances, began to sound notes of caution soon after practice began -- and kept it up after the team rose to No. 4 in the rankings against a weak early schedule.
"I've said from the first week we were undeserving of our rankings," he said. "But excuses are a sign of weakness. I wasn't giving excuses. I gave the state of the union of where we're at. There was no rhyme or reason for us to be ranked … and we shouldn't have been. We've done some good things -- beat Miami on the road, played tough at Villanova, played tough against Connecticut -- but by and large we were supposed to struggle this year."
You can't believe anything the man says. But I thought sucess was a choice, Rick.
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