Louisville basketball coach Rick Pitino had some choice words for Syracuse and Pittsburgh regarding each school's "48-hour decision" for leaving the Big East for the ACC. But he also seems fixated on putting Boston College on notice for the school's lack of ACC titles.
"Boston College has one of the premier ADs in the country, in my opinion. I worked with the man at Kentucky. So you can get $2 million more by joining the ACC? Boston College, which probably has an endowment close to a $1 billion, is going to worry about $ 2 million more? How about they only had one championship since joining the ACC in 2005. To me, I would rather win 30-40 championships and be very successful then have $2 million in my pocket. I learned that a long time ago with the Boston Celtics. I had a lot of money in my pocket, but I wasn't happy."
Here we go again with ACC title narrative. I mean, how irrational is this argument? Only on Planet Pitino does the number of conference championships a school wins validate whether a conference change was successful or not. On Planet Pitino, in said alternate universe, Boston College decided to move to the MAC back in 2004 and cleaned up on basketball and Olympic sports titles. Clearly this was the right move in Pitino's mind.
To be clear, just because Notre Dame, Louisville and Connecticut have been cleaning up wrt Big East non-revenue conference titles doesn't mean that the Big East is the best conference for these schools. Rather, it means that the level of competition is that much worse. I can't think of a non-revenue sport which the Big East is more competitive than the ACC. Baseball, softball, soccer, lacrosse, field hockey, tennis ... all (much) more competitive in the ACC.
For whatever reason, Boston College university spokesman Jack Dunn dignified Pitino's comments with a statement:
"The primary considerations behind Boston College's decision to join the ACC were academics, conference stability and financial security. ... The financial benefit is also considerably higher than the figure suggested by Coach Pitino."
The only thing I would add to Dunn's statement is more competitive athletics.
In other Pitino news, he also made this embarrassing analogy about ACC expansion, just over a year after publicly revealing in court that he cheated on his wife of 27 years by having sex with Karen Sypher. Maybe you should spend more time working on your ACC expansion analogies and less time worrying about Boston College's non-revenue conference title count.
Someone will be sure to remind Pitino about these comments after Louisville moves to the Big 12 and fails to win 30-40 conference titles six years in, yes?