When the NCAA males’s faculty basketball event begins Thursday, certainly one of its most sudden nationwide title contenders might be led by a coach whose return to prominence as soon as might need felt inconceivable.

Eight years after scandals ended Rick Pitino’s tenure at one of many nation’s most profitable applications and led him to search out work midway around the globe, the 72-year-old has an opportunity to face atop the school sport once more due to No. 2 seed St. John’s (30-4).

It’s the document sixth faculty that has made the event underneath Pitino, who had already made historical past as the primary to win a nationwide championship at two faculties and advance to a Last 4 with three.

5 many years into his profession, at a time when a lot of Pitino’s teaching contemporaries have lengthy since retired, Pitino did the alternative. He not solely needed to get again to the school sport, he was keen to take a circuitous path to get there. And regardless of returning to a school system that has undergone seismic modifications — from permitting gamers to revenue off their identify, picture and likeness, to hopping between faculties with out penalty by way of the switch portal — Pitino has thrived.

“I actually don’t consider within the phrase ‘redemption’ as a result of those that choose you actually don’t know the info,” Pitino mentioned Monday on ESPN’s Pat McAfee Present. “They actually don’t know both manner, harmless or responsible. They don’t understand it.”

Amid a celebration inside New York’s Madison Sq. Backyard final week after St. John’s received its first Huge East event title in a quarter-century, St. John’s star RJ Luis, the convention’s participant of the 12 months, who transferred in by way of the portal to play for Pitino, informed reporters to direct credit score towards the septuagenerian on the sideline.

“Coach P is the mastermind behind all of this,” Luis mentioned. “I imply, it’s really particular.”

The scene would have been tough to think about in 2017, when Pitino was fired by the College of Louisville following an FBI investigation that alleged the college had organized funds for the household of a recruit. It stained his job prospects. Pitino, in 2020, informed a radio present in Louisville that he had been “type of been blackballed out of the enterprise for 2 and a half years,” and whereas he maintained that he was harmless of wrongdoing, “I used to be the chief and I deserved to be fired.” (In 2022, an impartial overview course of ended the case by giving solely gentle penalties to Louisville and none to Pitino.)

In 2018, Louisville was compelled to vacate the 2013 nationwide championship it received underneath Pitino following an NCAA investigation into allegations a faculty staffer organized for intercourse and strippers with recruits.

“I wasn’t exiled away, however no one actually needed to cope with hiring me at that time,” Pitino mentioned in 2023. He may have retired. He had been faculty basketball’s highest-paid coach, and was already enshrined within the Naismith Basketball Corridor of Fame. But Pitino, a self-described “basketball junkie,” couldn’t steer clear of the sideline, even when it meant taking jobs far exterior his common highlight.

In 2018 he trekked to Athens, the place he coached in Europe’s high skilled league. Two years later, he returned to his native New York to educate Iona, a school so small its total enrollment would fill lower than a fifth of Pitino’s former Louisville area.

He declared, upon his hiring at Iona, that the job could be his final.

“The rationale I mentioned that’s, who’s going to rent a 70-year-old?” he mentioned in 2023. It turned out that main Iona to 2 NCAA tournaments and profitable extra video games (27) in 2022-23, his final season there, than this system had in any of the 25 seasons earlier than made Pitino a horny candidate for St. John’s. The college, like Pitino, was a former energy that had misplaced its shine. It had certified for the NCAA event 20 occasions in 26 years earlier than 2002, however simply three since.

Pitino, with a profession .713 profitable proportion, has received all over the place since he first turned an interim head coach at Hawaii in 1976. Amongst lively Division I coaches, Pitino’s 37 seasons as a head coach rank third and his 761 profession victories rank sixth. These totals could be even bigger if not for Pitino’s six seasons teaching the NBA’s Knicks and Celtics, and the 123 victories vacated from 2010 by 2015 on account of NCAA penalties.