Louisville Basketball: ‘Healing’ Amidst Exhibition Loss

Education and empathy are the enemies of emotion.

LOUISVILLE, KY– It’s easy to look at the product on the court for the Louisville Cardinals this past Sunday and criticize the players and the coaching staff for losing an exhibition game to a Division II School. In fact, not only is it easy but it is also common. Louisville lost to Lenoir-Ryne College, a Division II school in Hickory, North Carolina.

The outcry from Cardinal Nation after this loss has been mostly negative with a small amount of rationality. But instead of looking at what is wrong and basing our emotions off of a small amount of knowledge, I challenge us to take a step back and understand what is really going on here because clearly it is more than basketball.

One thing from the post-game press conference with Kenny Payne that should be embedded into the minds of Cardinal Nation is that this team is still healing from the Chris Mack era.

Coach Payne was hired to right the ship once Chris Mack and the University of Louisville decided to part ways. Clearly, by his statement there is still some remnants of the Mack culture that is affecting their game even to this day. On the He’s One of Us With Larry O’Bannon episode of the Beef’s Beef podcast, former Louisville basketball star Larry O’Bannon gives insight into the Chris Mack era and what potentially went wrong:

• He contrasted the Mack style of play with the Pitino style of play noting that Pitino’s style of play was fast-paced and up-tempo whereas Mack’s was more half-court based and patient.
• He noted the lack of team cohesion and leadership from the players on the court.
• He noticed a lack of presence on the sidelines. Pitino was fiery and animated whereas Mack was more reserved and seated on the bench.
• Lastly, he mentioned the six game suspension that Mack served and how it may have created inconsistency on the sidelines.

Certainly it is fair to say the personalities of Chris Mack and Rick Pitino are very different. Pitino, an Italian, is naturally going to be more outgoing and fiery, whereas Mack came into this program from a smaller school and was learning to adjust to a university with a storied basketball program.

He had his successes early on in his Louisville career, taking the Cardinals to the NCAA tournament in his first season as coach and in less than two years of being hired, led them to a number one overall seed in the country.

But his success would not last as a scandal with one of his assistant coaches began to surface off the court, and on the court the players played for themselves instead of each other. It seemed like the combination of the scandal and Mack losing the locker room forced him to leave the program.

So the remnants of all of these issues are still finding their way back into the locker room this year. Especially because there are seven players from last year’s team who are returning to the roster this year. The culture of selfishness and not playing for one another is the culture that Coach Payne is here to fix. If there is one word that could sum up his tenure here, it would be unity.

He cares about the name on the front of the jersey and the name on the back of the jersey. He wants this team to play for each other and take pride in the program as he leads the way. Giving him and the athletes grace as they work through these problems is crucial to the program’s success because as Coach made aware at Louisville Live: we can only do this if we do it together.