Former University of Louisville (UL) basketball players and recruits detailed their experiences with strippers and escorts on the school's campus.
Speaking with ESPN's "Outside the Lines," the players said they attended parties at a UL residence hall between 2010 and 2014 where women were hired by a former basketball staffer to strip for them and, in some cases, have sex with them.
Speaking anonymously, the players each detailed a different party, though each one was held in Billy Minardi Hall, OTL reported. Two of the five players who attended these parties wound up not committing to UL, while the other three did.
Katina Powell brought forth the allegations in a book, "Breaking Cardinal Rules: Basketball and the Escort Queen," published earlier this month. An escort claiming to have firsthand knowledge of these parties, Powell also claimed she dealt directly with Andre McGee, a former player and graduate assistant coach, to organize them.
She told OTL's John Barr that McGee implied to her that UL head men's basketball coach Rick Pitino knew "everything." However, the coach told ESPN neither he nor anyone on his staff or team knew what was allegedly going on.
Both UL and the NCAA are investigating Powell's allegations, and the NCAA could rule that Pitino should have known what was going on. ESPN's Jeff Goodman, a reporter who is investigating the story for OTL, joined Bob Ley on "SportsCenter" to discuss potential sanctions against UL and Pitino.
"Whether he had knowledge or not, because again, he can't just say 'I didn't know,'" he said. "It went on in his program, he's accountable, he's responsible."
Goodman pointed out that the NCAA now expects head coaches to know everything that goes on within their program. Both Jim Boeheim and Larry Brown were suspended multiple games for "failure to monitor."
Goodman told Ley if the NCAA were to obtain "corroborating stories from these recruits that were in the room at the same time talking about their experience, it would be hard to imagine Louisville skating on this."
