The Louisville men’s basketball program is one of the country’s most successful. The Cardinals have made regular NCAA tournament appearances for decades, and along their way, they’ve been among the best teams in whichever conference they’ve called home. Louisville has won the title of five different leagues as it’s worked its way up the college sports pecking order, and 10 years ago this spring, the school won the national championship, conquering all of Division I. Since 2014, U of L has been an up-and-down but frequently up member of the ACC, one of the sport’s best leagues.
All of which is to say: There is no existing frame of reference that can capture how bad Louisville is this season.
The Cardinals are not just the worst team to come out of a recent national championship–winning program in modern times—a distinction that appears to offer no close second—but one of the worst teams to ever take the court in one of college basketball’s power conferences. They have three wins against 23 losses. In Ken Pomeroy’s ratings of every team in Division I, the Cardinals are 285th. While that’s an upward jump of 10 spots from earlier this week, based on a plucky showing in their latest loss on Wednesday to Virginia, it still leaves Louisville in historic company this season, the program’s first under a new head coach, former U of L player Kenny Payne. Pomeroy’s ratings go back to 2002, and the 2022-23 Louisville team’s best power-league comparables are 2016 Rutgers (which finished 279th in the efficiency ratings) and 2012 Utah (which finished 302nd). That Rutgers team won seven games, and the Utah squad won six. Pomeroy’s projections peg Louisville to finish 4–27. It’s conceivable that we’re looking at the overall worst power conference season for any team in at least 20 years.
Louisville’s season defies belief and any easy explanation. What happened? Whose fault is it? What should happen now? All are points of debate among an intensely argumentative fanbase. This Louisville team is an all-time window into the spectacular and multifaceted ways a college athletic program can fall into a ditch. “Depending on who you ask, it’s either Kenny Payne’s fault, or it’s Chris Mack’s fault, or it’s Rick Pitino’s fault, or it’s Matt Bevin, the former governor’s, fault,” Mark Ennis, a longtime radio host in the city who hosts a drive-time show on the city’s ESPN Radio channel, told me, naming the last two coaches before Payne. “What is it? ‘Success has many fathers, and failure is an orphan.’ What’s happening with Kenny and who’s to blame and how you fix it is really a proxy war between different factions about something totally different.”
A chronology is in order. From 2001, Louisville’s head coach was Rick Pitino, who’d won a national title in the ’90s at Louisville’s blood rival, the University of Kentucky, before trying his hand at the NBA and then returning to college at Louisville. Pitino was an excellent coach whose program had an uncanny knack for scandals. In one, a self-described Louisville madam said that one of Pitino’s staffers had repeatedly arranged sex parties for players and recruits. In another, the literal FBI got involved, though it’s worth stressing that the only thing at issue here was the high crime of Pitino maybe knowing about Louisville paying to land a recruit, something that happens all the time and that he denies knowledge of to this day. Another time, Pitino became the target of an extortion effort after having sex that he testified lasted “15 seconds” in an empty restaurant.
Pitino’s boss, and the guy who hired him, was longtime Louisville athletic director Tom Jurich. Louisville’s athletic department had a mesmerizing volume of shenanigans while Jurich was at the helm, and not only in basketball. But Jurich was often (though not always) successful at hiring coaches, and he hung onto his job for many years despite numerous events that easily could have gotten many ADs fired.
Eventually, Pitino and Jurich did get fired, both for cause, after Louisville came up prominently in the FBI’s investigation into college basketball corruption in 2017. By that time, the people who might protect them had found themselves shuffled out. Louisville’s non-athletic administration had a mind-boggling list of its own scandals, and Bevin, the Republican governor, dissolved the school’s trustee board and rebuilt it with his own members in 2016. (One of the new board members was “Papa John” Schnatter, who later resigned after saying the N-word.) Bevin’s new board did not get on well with Jurich and Pitino, and Pitino later mocked Bevin when he lost his reelection. Pitino sued Louisville over withheld buyout money and later settled. Jurich also reached a settlement, getting $4.5 million and official acknowledgement from Louisville that his firing was not for cause.
With Jurich and Pitino out, Louisville hired a new athletic director, Vince Tyra, who hired a new basketball coach, Chris Mack. Mack had won a bunch at Xavier and seemed like a great hire on paper. In his second year, Louisville had a good team and reached No. 1 in the polls at one point, but the pandemic canceled the NCAA tournament. The next season, after a nice start, Louisville faded and missed the tournament. Mack made staff changes, and because this is Louisville, one of the assistants he was sending away attempted to blackmail the head coach over NCAA violations. It did not go well for the assistant, Dino Gaudio, who pleaded guilty to extortion. But it also didn’t go well for Mack, who got NCAA charges against his program and a suspension to start the next season. Mack never got the team winning, and the school and coach split in January 2022. Tyra had resigned, and the coach and the school’s interim athletic director “agreed the place had become too toxic for Mack to continue,” ESPN reported. Louisville’s latest NCAA problem wound up outlasting the coach who’d been at the center of it.
Last June, Louisville made that interim AD, Josh Heird, the permanent boss of the department. The school did so over the objections of a loud collection of boosters who wanted Jurich to be reinstalled as athletic director. In Heird’s first big act as AD, he hired Payne to coach the basketball team. It made tons of sense: Payne was a great Louisville player, and he’d been a top assistant to John Calipari at Kentucky, where he took an important role in developing Kentucky’s many talented big men. Payne would also be the first Black head coach at a school whose upper administration has never reflected the nearly one-fourth Black population of its city.
Payne’s first season has been an inexplicable horror show. Louisville’s past four recruiting classes heading into the season ranked 12th, 29th, 17th, and 24th in the country, according to 247Sports. Whatever limitations Louisville’s NCAA case might have put on Payne’s recruiting after he took the job, the team has a handful of players who came as highly regarded recruits either as transfers or high school prospects. None of this guarantees that a team will be good, but it should be more than enough to avoid being as bad as Louisville has been. But the Cardinals have not developed any discernible strengths as a team, and their weaknesses have been devastating. They turn the ball over on 23 percent of their possessions (ranking 356th out of 363 DI teams), according to Pomeroy, a manifestation of a lack of ball-handling guards. Just over 40 percent of their baskets feature a player credited with an assist, because the offense does not move the ball cohesively. The frontcourt, a Payne strength, has been bad. Opponents have been able to make shots more or less at will. Maybe things would have gone differently if Louisville’s first three games were not all 1-point losses to in-town opponent Bellarmine of the ASUN, Wright State of the Horizon League, and Appalachian State of the Sun Belt. But maybe Louisville was lucky to be close in those games. The Cardinals lost a preseason game by 10 to Lenoir-Rhyne, a team that is currently 10–14 … in Division II.
You can see how Louisville fans, based on their allegiances to individual actors, could hold widely variable views of whom to blame. If you think Pitino and Jurich should have been allowed to continue to cook no matter what scandals befell the program, then you might blame Bevin or his board for not circling the wagons around a coach and AD who won a lot of games together. If you think actions should have consequences, you might blame Pitino and Jurich’s leadership for putting the program in a compromising position more than a half-decade ago and setting these events in motion. You might blame Mack for failing to meet expectations or to stay on the NCAA straight-and-narrow, or Tyra, the AD who hired him, for picking the wrong successor to Pitino. You might blame the ex-assistant who tried to extort the program. You might blame the current AD, Heird, or the current coach, Payne, because as grim a situation as they might have inherited, it’s hard to fathom that things needed to be this bleak. Any number of people might have prevented it by doing any number of things differently.
Louisville, at some point, will dig out of the extraordinary hole it has dived into headfirst. The school has too much brand equity not to, and it is likely not possible for a team in the ACC to remain this level of bad for more than a year. A couple of four-star recruits are already signed up for next season. If Payne doesn’t improve the direction of things, someone else will. It only takes a few good players to drastically turn a basketball program’s fortunes. But the 2022-23 Cardinals will go down in the annals of college basketball history, anyway, and not just because of the degree of their struggles. The most historic thing about this season isn’t how bad things have gotten but the circuitous route that brought Louisville to this place.
