It was another historic performance Saturday in Louisville for the Cardinals, one of many the team has put together for the last two seasons.
The Louisville men’s basketball team is making the wrong kind of history, though.
Their 28-point halftime deficit yesterday to Virginia, per Cardinals stats guru Kelly Dickey, was their third-largest ever—and the biggest since the 1938-39 season.
It was the second time in recent history that the team scored just 13 points in the first half.
Yesterday’s game did not get much closer. Virginia lead by 20 until garbage time, beating Louisville 69-52 in the end.
It has been quite the fall. In December of 2019,
The Courier Journal wrote that Louisville was “the center of the college basketball world.” Chris Mack’s Cardinals were ranked No. 1.
They finished tied for second in the ACC and were ranked No. 15 in the country when COVID ended the college basketball season.
For Louisville, it’s been mostly downhill since then. Mack was suspended for the first six games of the 2021-22 season for how he handled an extortion attempt.
Assistant Dino Gaudio tried to extort Mack regarding low-level NCAA violations after being told told his contract wouldn’t be renewed.
Mack recorded the conversation and alerted the Louisville administration, but he was suspended for failing “to follow university guidelines, policies, and procedures in handling the matter.
(Louisville was looking to remain squeaky-clean after a variety of scandals under former coach Rick Pitino—an employee hiring sex workers for players, Adidas paying a recruit’s father $100,000, a woman Pitino had sex with trying to extort him, etc.)
Donors and the fanbase turned on Mack after an 11-9 start that year, and he and Louisville reached a separation argeement in January of 2022.
His tenure was considered one of the worst in modern team history.
