Louisville suffers ultimate embarrassment with Koron Davis disaster, another awful loss

Louisville men’s basketball continued its fall to rock bottom on Wednesday, and somehow an embarrassing home loss to Arkansas State was not their biggest disgrace of the day.

Before the game, Louisville sent out a two-sentence press release saying guard Koron Davis had transferred from the program. Davis, who joined the Cardinals this year as a JUCO transfer, had not appeared in a game this season, and was mysteriously absent from the team’s bench during recent games. There was only one problem: Davis said he didn’t transfer.

The player issued a series of posts on social media saying he never told anyone he wanted to transfer, and that he enjoyed being a student-athlete at the school. A day later, Louisville sent out another press release saying he had been dismissed from the program.

Read Davis’ tweets here:

Mike Rutherford has a full breakdown of the weirdness surrounding Davis at our Louisville community Card Chronicle. There was obviously a rift between Louisville head coach Kenny Payne and Davis. Davis might also not be good enough to play at the ACC level. Some college hoops insiders have speculated that Payne was trying to protect Davis by saying he was transferring when the program was really choosing to dismiss him, but the ensuing drama turned out to be another humiliation for a once proud program sinking towards the bottom.

Davis was sitting in the stands to support his former teammates later that day as the team suffered a terrible loss to Arkansas State.

Rutherford wrote an incredible feature on Louisville hitting rock bottom a day before the Koron Davis saga played out. There’s no better source for Louisville analysis than Card Chronicle.

So who is to blame for all of this? It sure seems like Payne will be the fall guy, and Louisville will be in the market for a new head coach. Louisville went 4-28 last year in Payne’s first season. The Cards are off to a 4-6 start this year, but their four wins are against UMBC, Coppin St., New Mexico St., and Ballarmine. After going 2-18 in ACC play last year, this looks like a program that will at least be as bad, and maybe worse, in conference play this season.

Louisville has already lost to Chattanooga and DePaul this season before falling to Arkansas State. It doesn’t seem like it’s going to get any better from here.

It wasn’t long ago that Louisville was one of the proudest programs in the sport, with a 2013 (vacated) national championship to show for it. How did Louisville sink so fast the bottom? You can start with the NCAA investigation amid a widespread college basketball bribery scandal that led to the program firing Pitino and cleaning house in the athletic department. That investigation was a relic of the pre-NIL landscape, and now feels totally unnecessary. Chris Mack was hired to be Pitino’s successor, and he had two 20-win seasons in four years before eventually being fired for consecutive 13-win seasons to end his tenure.

Payne was a former assistant coach at Kentucky who was known as an ace recruiter for John Calipari. Payne just hasn’t been able to get the same recruiting wins at Louisville, and his on-court coaching has been totally disorganized on both ends of the floor. Kentucky, meanwhile, keeps recruiting as well as many program in America.

Louisville’s recent glory days of the Pitino era feel so far away. Louisville truly needs to build this program from the ground up, and just getting back to respectability would be a huge win.