The Winners and Sinners portion of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament has, appropriately, alighted in Providence, R.I. It’s an old mafia town, home once upon a time to the Patriarca crime family and a mayor who was elected as a crime buster but later did four years in the state pen for racketeering conspiracy. Stuff happened, but business got done.
Yes, the neighborhood fits. This is the perfect location to host Rick Pitino, John Calipari, Bill Self and Will Wade. So many March Madness wins, so many investigations and asterisks.
On the court, Pitino has been to seven Final Fours and won two national championships—he’s the only coach to win titles at two different schools (Kentucky and Louisville). In the NCAA record book, Pitino is credited with five Final Fours and one title. The 2012 and ’13 appearances at Louisville were vacated by the NCAA as sanctions for rules violations—he’s also the only men’s basketball coach to have a natty vacated. Pitino is in the Hall of Fame.
On the court, Calipari has six Final Fours and one national championship. In the NCAA record book, Cal is credited with four Final Fours—he’s the only coach to have them vacated at two different schools (Massachusetts’s 1996 appearance and Memphis’s in 2008). Calipari is in the Hall of Fame.
On the court, Self has four Final Fours and two national championships, all at Kansas. In the NCAA record book, he is credited with three Final Fours—the 2018 appearance has been expunged. Self is in the Hall of Fame.
Total number of Hall of Famers elsewhere in this tournament? One. Michigan State’s Tom Izzo.
The 42-year-old Wade is the least accomplished of the bunch, with only two NCAA tournament victories in 2019—and he’s been able to keep both of those. But he’s not far removed from his brazen, “strong-ass offer” days at LSU that got him fired on the eve of the NCAA tourney after being charged with a panoply of violations. Wade relocated to backwater McNeese State in ’23, was suspended his first 10 games on the job, and has taken the Cowboys to consecutive Big Dance bids. He is still in oily mode, with reports that he has reached an agreement to be the next coach at North Carolina State breaking the day before McNeese plays here.
All four men are a testament to one universal truth in college basketball: If you win, you will endure. Things may get messy, but messes can be cleaned up—or left behind, or simply ignored—when there are trophies to chase and money to make.
And now here they all are in one place, a collision of coaching giants with intersecting paths.
The NCAA perpetually denies made-for-TV matchmaking when constructing its tournament pairings. Perhaps it was sheer bracket serendipity that put No. 7 seed Kansas and Self, No. 10 seed Arkansas and Calipari, and No. 2 seed St. John’s Pitino in one Providence grouping. Perhaps not. Nobody here seems to be buying the coincidence angle.
“You watch,” Self said he told his staff last week. “We’re going to play Arkansas.”
Calipari said he had a similar premonition, and similar staff conversation, predicting his team would play Kansas. And then saying that the No. 2 seed in their path would be “him.” The “him” is Pitino, who has had several chapters of sworn-enemy competition with Calipari stretching back 33 years.
The only thing missing from this TV drama is where the games are being contested, as Calipari pointed out.
“I thought it may be played somewhere else,” he said, then went into call-and-response mode with the media. “Where do you think I thought they would put us to play?”
“Lexington,” came the answer.
Calipari nodded.
“Come on,” he said. “And they didn’t? When I saw we weren’t there, I’m like, ‘Wow, somebody must have been sick and went to the bathroom or something for them not to put us there.’ ”
The NCAA did spare both Cal and Pitino from going back to where they coached and won national titles. But everything else is in place for new chapters in old rivalries.
The first-round game between the Jayhawks and Razorbacks is a coaching rematch of the 2008 and ’12 national championship games. Self won the former in famously dramatic fashion when Cal was at Memphis; Cal won the second when he was at Kentucky. The two have also played many times in the regular season and clashed repeatedly on the recruiting trail chasing five-stars—with the backing of competing shoe brands.
And a potential Calipari-Pitino second-round game would rekindle NCAA memories from 1992 (Pitino and Kentucky beat Cal and UMass in the Sweet 16, with Cal being ejected); ’96 (the national semifinals, won by Pitino); 2012 (national semifinals, won by Calipari); and ’14 (Sweet 16, won by Calipari). They also have met more than a dozen times in the regular season and sparred over recruits.
When you’ve been around as long as these guys, there are ebbs and flows in fortunes. Calipari and Self come into this tournament off of rare seasons of struggle. Pitino comes in riding high, after a period in exile and a search for the path back to the top.
For months, Arkansas did not resemble an NCAA tournament team. The Razorbacks started SEC play 0–5, and weren’t fully assured of a bid until the final week of the regular season. Calipari put together a nine-man roster and has had to work around significant injuries to two of those players. The Hogs kept reinventing themselves until they won just enough games in the brutal SEC to get here.
“They threw us in the coffin, forgot the nails,” Calipari said. “We bust out somehow.”
This is the lowest seeding of Calipari’s 25 NCAA appearances. After losing to No. 15 seeds in 2022 and ’24, this is a welcome role reversal for him. “I’m back to the roots of the underdog,” he said, and it’s a role that a lifetime fighter will clearly relish.
For Self, this is the lowest seeding he’s had since he was at Tulsa in 2000. Kansas has been such a rock-chalk, rock-solid presence in this tournament for 35 years that it’s jarring for them to be shuttled off across the country, with no geographic preference and less pressure.
Self, like Cal, will take the change of status and try to turn it to his advantage.
“Being close to home also can add pressure, too, because of the expectations and things like that,” he said. “I think there’s less distractions when you get away. So I’m looking at this as a very positive thing.”
For Pitino, his 76th NCAA tournament game comes 42 years after his first, as a 30-year-old coach at Boston University. His first Final Four was four years later as the coach of the hometown team here, the Providence Friars. That season revealed Pitino’s genius, which has been confirmed over and over since then in a career rife with Shakespearean plot twists.
The FBI investigation of corruption in college basketball cost Pitino his position at Louisville in 2017. (Self, also caught up in the same investigation, kept his job.) At age 65, that looked like it might be the end of the line. He went into exile in Greece, coaching in the EuroLeague, and it wound up being the start of a long journey back to where he is now.
“It was a major silver lining,” Pitino said of his time in Greece. “It rejuvenated me. It stopped me from being bitter at all. It’s just adversity. You can look adversity square in the eyes and piss all over it if you’re smart. So don’t hang your head, pick yourself up, get on, become the best EuroLeague coach you can possibly be and move on.”
The next move was Iona in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference—a long way from Kentucky and Louisville, but a foothold. Iona played its role, giving a coach who is damaged goods a chance to show how gifted he still is. Pitino obliged by taking the Gaels to two NCAA tournaments in three seasons.
Reputation laundered and coaching chops confirmed, it was time for a suitably hungry program to swoop in and return the coach to the big time. That program is St. John’s, which had history and location but maddeningly little recent success. Pitino has delivered brilliantly, winning 20 games last season and 30 this year—with more likely to come. He’s now the first coach to take six schools to the NCAA tournament, and in a couple of weeks, he could be the first coach to take four schools to the Final Four.
Wade is following an identical scandal recovery cycle. After being fired at LSU, McNeese took the PR hit in exchange for an immediate program reboot, and Wade had to rehab somewhere. He won the Southland Conference two years in a row and, once this tournament run is over (perhaps Thursday) he will take his freshly laundered image to the ACC and NC State.
What did McNeese get out of the deal? Two years of victories and exposure, two NCAA tournament checks and an increase in average attendance of 1,584 fans per game last year (then a slight decrease from that number, down 133 fans per game this season). The school also gets a $1 million buyout, according to Wade’s contract.
Is that a lasting bump or a blip? Look at Iona for precedent. In two seasons post-Pitino, the Gaels are 33–34 with no NCAA bids. They just fired coach Tobin Anderson this week. There was no sustained momentum from hiring Pitino, nothing that altered the program’s long-term trajectory. McNeese State may well have the same experience.
This is how the post-scandal cycle works for the best coaches. There may be sanctions, there may be embarrassment. But if they’re good enough, they will always get another chance. The Providence Winners and Sinners Bracket is proof positive.