Louisville basketball to name David Padgett as interim head coach after Rick Pitino’s firing

Louisville basketball has been named David Padgett its new interim coach, the school announced. Padgett gets the Cardinals’ top job only two days after Rick Pitino was “effectively fired” for his role in the FBI’s widespread investigation into corruption in college basketball.

Padgett, only 32 years old, was hired as an assistant on Pitino’s staff in March of 2015. He has deep ties to the Pitino-era Cardinals. As a player, he left Kansas to transfer to Louisville in 2004, where he spent three seasons as the team’s starting center.

Here’s what Mike Rutherford, founder of SB Nation’s Louisville community Card Chronicle, wrote about the program’s decision to hire Padgett:

The good in this is obvious. He’s the team’s choice and he’s been a favorite of the fan base since he first transferred in from Kansas more than a decade ago. This will not be a difficult team to root for.

The bad, if you want to call it that, is that if the intention here is to “clean house,” this doesn’t really accomplish that. Padgett is extremely close with Rick Pitino and has been linked to Louisville basketball more or less since 2004. I’m fine with that, so long as it can be absolutely proven that he had nothing to do with the transgressions that led us to this place, but my guess is there are others who are not.

Here’s the mentality I think we all have to take, and the mentality that makes Padgett the right choice: Just focus on the season. Fears about future NCAA sanctions and players leaving and recruiting falling off completely are legitimate, but they’re not going to affect November-March (the NCAA couldn’t move quickly on this for Louisville to be potentially banned from the postseason and I can’t imagine U of L would go the self-impose route again ... at least not at this point).

For more on the aftermath of this scandal, follow our corruption fallout tracker.