Pat Kelsey's existential rebuild

Can Louisville's Plan C arrest a proud program's decline?

Photo credit: Louisville Athletics

In late March, not long after he was hired to be the Louisville head men’s basketball coach, Pat Kelsey featured in a video on the team’s Instagram page. The premise of the clip was pretty simple, Kelsey on a tour through the Cardinals’ basketball facilities, including his new office.

Kelsey’s reaction to the latter is what really put the mildly viral video over the top:

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The new coach couldn’t fathom the size of the smoothly appointed cavern; he assumed it must be some kind of shared lounge. “This is my office?!” It is an endearing reaction, a bit like a home-build reality show contestant seeing their new kitchen for the first time. Even if you think Kelsey is cheekily playing it up for effect — and he almost certainly is, even as he then immediately calibrates that response down — he plays it well. You can’t help but relate. Louisville fans loved it.

The subtext is more interesting than the clip itself. Kelsey could only seem shocked by Louisville’s largesse because of the departure from his previous career it represented. That was the joke. The same reaction wouldn’t have worked for, say, Baylor coach Scott Drew, Louisville’s reported first choice, who declined the Cardinals a year after the Baylor program he built opened its new arena. It wouldn’t have worked for Dusty May, Louisville’s other top choice, who may have built Florida Atlantic out of an office next to a janitor’s closet but spent 18 months fending off every major job offer in college basketball. (The hottest name of the carousel chose Michigan instead.)

Kelsey’s reaction only worked for Kelsey, the former coach of Charleston for three seasons and Winthrop for nine, a respected and energetic but nonetheless relatively minor Division I figure. That Kelsey was the one touring the space spoke as much to his sudden rise as Louisville’s lack of options. After years of disastrous drift and a abyssal bottoming out under Kenny Payne, what used to be one of the biggest and best jobs in the sport went to a man with zero career NCAA Tournament wins.

That does not mean it was a bad hire. Indeed — and, for what’s it worth, spoiler, this is the suspicion here — it might end up being an inspired one. It is undeniably a fascinating one. Either way, above all, it is a marriage that desperately needs to pay dividends quickly, lest Louisville resign itself to the diminished state that got Kelsey entry to that big shiny office in the first place.

It sounds overly dramatic, but it’s true. The stakes of Kelsey’s arrival at the Yum! Center are nothing less than existential.

Most of that is down to Kenny Payne, who, in two short years, did about as much damage as any one person could possibly do to a previously viable college basketball program.