MINNEAPOLIS -- Richard Pitino sat calmly in the middle of the room, his eager players flanking him and his restless children in front of him on the floor, as the teams with NCAA Tournament bids flashed on a big screen.
There went Louisville, an awfully familiar name.
Next came Minnesota, his current team.
Pitino simply smiled, fully and immediately aware of the extra intrigue created by the selection committee with this East Region matchup of No. 7 and 10 seeds.
The madness of March has been built on all those low-major upsets and buzzer-beating swishes that bust up the office-pool brackets, but some of the must-see TV each year is arranged before the opening tip.
The Louisville-Minnesota game is one of those predetermined talkers, pitting Pitino and the Gophers against the storied program that fired his father, Rick Pitino, prior to the 2017-18 season in response to the federal investigation into a nationwide college basketball bribery and corruption case. Richard Pitino served two stints as an assistant with the Cardinals under his dad, who has been coaching a professional team in Greece this season.
"Has he talked about Louisville the last two years? Yeah, he has, not in the most positive light," Pitino said. "It's not going to be about me. I'm not going to be, 'Oh, it's revenge,' or anything like that. It's about our players. It's about this program."
The Gophers will go to the NCAA Tournament for a second time in six seasons under Pitino.
"We know he's been there a long time, his dad's been there, but we can't make it all about the Pitino family," senior shooting guard Dupree McBrayer said. "This is a team game."
The Cardinals and Gophers were sent to Des Moines, Iowa, where they'll face off Thursday with a late morning tipoff.
If the Gophers beat Louisville, there will likely be an even more familiar foe waiting for them in the next game: Michigan State. The No. 2 seed Spartans play No. 15 Bradley to start. That potential Michigan State-Minnesota matchup would be a big deal for the Big Ten even if not in the rest of the country.
Such an intraconference matchup on the first weekend is a rarity. In 2011, when the Big East sent a record 11 teams to the NCAA Tournament out of what was then a 16-team league, there were two all-Big East games in the second round: Cincinnati-Connecticut and Syracuse-Marquette.
According to David Worlock, a former Henderson State University sports information director who is currently the NCAA's director of media coordination and statistics, the committee tries to avoid such matchups if possible. Tournament principles state that teams who played only once during the season can meet as early as the second round, and this season the Spartans and Gophers only met once. If two teams played twice, they're allowed to meet as early as the regional semifinals. If they met three times, they couldn't match up until the regional finals.
Sports on 03/20/2019