Rick Pitino Goes On Epic Rant About Allegations Surrounding Louisville

A few months after shocking allegations were made about the Louisville men’s basketball team, head coach Rick Pitino used his Friday press conference to get a lot off his chest.

Pitino has been in the news quite a bit over the past few days after claims of him flipping off a Kentucky fan — which he denied — following his team’s 75-73 road loss to the Wildcats. He also didn’t show up to the postgame press conference.

Pitino denied flipping off the fans once again during Friday’s press conference, but he didn’t end there.

“I said it 36 hours before the game … I wasn’t doing the press conference because it’s a very emotional game for me,” he said. “When we go into a press conference in a neighborhood like that, I don’t want to hear about the scandal, OK? I don’t want to hear about that. That has bothered me every single night.”

Pitino was referring to the allegations made in October 2015 that strippers and prostitutes were provided to players and recruits from 2010 to 2014. Pitino has denied the allegations in the past, and he continued to do so during his latest press conference.

“The NCAA is upset at me because if I say, I can’t find one person, not one, that knew anything about it, the NCAA says you’re intimidating the witnesses,” he said. “That wasn’t my intent to say that. So that’s why I didn’t go to media day. They’re telling me I’m intimidating.

“Well, soon as this happened, I went ballistic on everybody. Wait a second. You didn’t know one, single thing? The security person. You never saw a thing in four years, and you worked for four years around the clock? No. Well, the answer’s obvious isn’t it, Rick, isn’t the answer obvious? The reason that nobody saw anything, they knew that all hell would break loose if I found out that one, single thing was going on. That would be the obvious thing to me.”