Former Louisville Head Coach Rick Pitino Makes Return to NCAA Tournament

(Photo of Rick Pitino: Adam Monacelli/Courier-Post via Imagn Content Services, LLC)

ATLANTIC CITY, N.J. - The Louisville men's basketball program still has one day to await their NCAA Tournament fate, but one former Cardinals head coach has already punched his ticket to the Big Dance.

Rick Pitino, who led Louisville from 2001 to 2017 and is in his first season as the head coach of Iona College, has officially made it back into the tournament field after the Gaels won the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference Championship on Saturday.

It is his first NCAA Tournament appearance since he was fired as the head coach of the Cardinals, and he becomes the third coach in NCAA history to take five different programs to the tournament, following Tubby Smith and Lon Kruger.

Entering the MAAC Tournament as the No. 9 seed, Iona (12-5, 6-3 MAAC) then fired off four upset wins in a row to win the championship and claim the conference's automatic bid for the NCAA Tournament. The Gaels could only complete 13 regular season games due to various COVID-19 issues.

Prior to being hired by Iona in March of 2020, Pitino spent two seasons overseas in Greece, where he coached the EuroLeague's Panathinaikos B.C. partially for the the 2018-19 and 2019-20 seasons.

Louisville fired Pitino, as well as longtime athletic director Tom Jurich, back in October of 2017 in the wake of the college basketball corruption scandal uncovered by the FBI and the Southern District of New York the month prior.

In his 16 years as the head coach, Pitino guided the Cardinals to a 416-143 record, three Final Fours and the 2013 national championship. 123 wins, three losses, as well as two Final Four appearances and the national title were later vacated by the NCAA as a result of the Andre McGee & Katina Powell sex scandal.

Over the course of his 33 seasons as a collegiate coach, he has an overall record of 782-276, and was the first coach in NCAA history to guide three different schools to the NCAA Final Four (Providence - 1987, Kentucky - 1993, 1996, 1997) as well as the first to win an NCAA Championship at two different schools (Kentucky - 1996). He was elected to the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame in 2013.

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