ACC Roundup - Shock At Louisville Over Jones' Arrest

A shaken Rick Pitino met with the media after Chris Jones' arrest and spoke about the situation and what led up to it.

If you haven't heard, Jones and two other men were arrested and charged with rape and sodomy.

Jones is accused of committing rape and sodomy individually against one woman and of acting together with the other two against the second woman.

Coincidentally, the alleged acts took place at Cardinal Towne, the same complex where Louisville cheerleader Danielle Cogswell died of a heroin overdose last November. 

Pitino spoke for some time and took questions. He talked about Jones obviously, but also about how he structures discipline in his program and what the expectations are.

To us, anyway, he came across as a pretty stand-up guy who wasn't making excuses. You can judge for yourself - the press conference is linked on this page.

It's a tough situation all the way around, first and foremost for the women.

In a way, you always hope these sort of allegations are false because what kind of person would do something like that? It's easier to believe that someone would lie than to believe someone could be that brutal.

The courts will sort that out in time and if Jones and the other men are found guilty, they face 20 years in jail.

Pitino said his players were distraught and that no one could believe it. That's an understandable reaction, really.

It's another tough situation for Pitino who's had a few body blows in recent years. He lost friends in the Twin Towers on 9/11, he went through the humiliation of the extortion trial with Karen Sypher and now this.

It's also stunned the university and the city. We'll see how it all plays out but we should all hope for justice and truth.

This might be a good time to point out that since expanding, both rounds, the ACC has had serious embarrassments from Miami, Syracuse and now Louisville. The ACC expanded to survive in big-time athletics; this is part of the price.

On the other hand, though, the conference didn't expand to get UNC and UNC has provided plenty of old-school ACC embarrassment on its own lately.

For the most part, Wake Forest fans, and the people who cover Wake basketball, have been so happy not to have Jeff Bzdelik around that Danny Manning has hardly been criticized.

He's not being directly criticized here either, but this is as close as anyone has gotten: "The most troubling part of Wednesday’s debacle is, given the ineptitude on both ends of the floor, the Deacons seemed to also be competing against themselves."

Last year the ACC welcomed new coaches at Wake, BC and Virginia Tech. Not surprisingly, those three schools are at or near the bottom of the ACC standings.

With them is Georgia Tech, a team that has come close so many times yet consistently fallen short.

In the Atlanta paper the other day, columnist Mark Bradley, inevitably, called for Gregory to go.

He seems the most likely ACC candidate to be pushed out; indeed there are already rumors that he expects to be fired.

If so, Tech will have the basic options every major school has: hire a big shot from somewhere else, hire an up-and-comer, hire a promising assistant or hire someone who is still good but may have had a problem last time out.

If we had to guess, we'd think Tech would have to look closely at Archie Miller. He knows the ACC, he's done a terrific job at Dayton, and no one doubts his potential.

If it were us, we'd make a play for Rhode Island's Danny Hurley. It might be difficult to get him out of the Northeast, which is where he has said he wants to be, but everything about him screams future greatness.