FanHouse Rick Pitino

NEW YORK -- Rick Pitino would like you to know one thing: His tawdry sex affair with a woman who faces federal charges of extortion and lying to the FBI is not going to have the slightest impact on his Louisville basketball team.

There are still plenty of legal hurdles to overcome and motions to be made before the case goes to trial and Pitino is summoned to the witness stand, where presumably his testimony against Karen Sypher will reveal even more salacious details about their romp in a Louisville restaurant, and the subsequent fallout that has engulfed the university's athletic department.

Beyond Pitino, the scandal has scarred Tim Sypher, who is now the operations director of the Cardinals' new gym and who was the team's equipment manager. Tim married Karen (they are now divorced) after she either had consensual sex with Pitino or was assaulted by him against her will -- it's a complicated connection that perhaps the trial will help unravel. The scandal has also greatly impacted Pitino's wife of 33 years, his five children, his extended New York family, Louisville's Catholic community where Pitino worships and pretty much anyone who has a rooting interest in the Cardinals.

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NEW YORK -- Despite recent revelations that Rick Pitino had an extramarital affair and then an alleged $10 million extortion attempt against him, the Louisville coach said those concerns have not been an issue with recruits.

"What you failed to realize in recruiting, it hasn't come up one time in one phone call," Pitino said. "Because you're [media] interested in it, because it's your job ... [but] the players and the recruits are not interested.

"All they're interested in are their futures, making their lives better for their families some day, becoming the best player they possibly can be and winning games. And that's really what they're tuned into."

Earlier today, we mentioned that Steve Phillips had been reportedly suspended by ESPN following the revelation of his (now no longer alleged) affair with a 22-year-old staff member named Brooke Hundley.

The affair become a public matter when Phillips called police because of concerns that Hundley, based on her previous statements, might harm his family (you can read about them here). ESPN, somewhat surprisingly, issued a statement from Phillips, and one of their own, on SportsCenter around 2:40 PM ET Wednesday.

Phillips first:

Rick Pitino's appearance at New York's Madison Square Garden Wednesday will surely be less pleasant than his previous one, when his Louisville team won the Big East tournament championship last March.

In the arena, at the conference's preseason basketball media day, Pitino will almost certainly face another volley of questions about his troubled offseason, this time specifically about his decision not to suspend two starters who tussled with off-duty police at an off-campus party two weekends ago.

In an interview with ESPN.com published four days after the Oct. 11 arrest of Terrence Jennings and Jerry Smith in Jeffersonville, Ind., Pitino said that the two players would be punished internally, "but no, they will not miss any game time.'' His action, or lack thereof, raised questions about whether he still could wield the authority to discipline players, after he was not disciplined at all by the university after his August acknowledgment of a past extramarital affair and its role in a sordid extortion investigation of the ex-wife of one of his staffers.

Raise your hand if you didn't see this coming a mile away.

Back in August, during the toxic dump of details of Rick Pitino's role in an extortion case that dragged the reputations of the coach, the University of Louisville and the basketball program through the mud, one obvious question that arose was whether Pitino's authority as head coach was undermined forever. After all, how can any coach who exercises that little self-discipline ever expect, much less demand, discipline from his players?

He can't. And this week, the red-and-black chickens have come home to roost.

Is it me, or is the bluegrass spiked with cannabis? In Louisville, there stood Casanova Rick Pitino, lambasting the media for reporting "a total fabrication of the truth" when, in truth, he lived an extraordinary lie for years and didn't reveal his sin -- having unprotected sex with a woman in a restaurant -- until his legal mess required it. In Lexington, you have Long John Calipari, earning a record $31.65 million to coach the Kentucky Wildcats after fleeing another scandal in a career filled with them.

And on a highway in Lawrenceburg, there was Billy Clyde Gillispie, Calipari's deposed predecessor, so intoxicated according to a police report that his speech was slurred, his eyes were red and glassy and he had trouble opening the glove compartment of his 2009 Mercedes to retrieve his insurance card. "He was confused about how to unlock the vehicle and took several tries to unlock the glove box," the report said of Gillispie, who spent the wee hours Thursday in Franklin County jail after his DUI arrest.

Rick Pitino is unraveling.

That's my interpretation of his press conference Wednesday, called so that the Louisville basketball coach could, well, who knows? It sounded like a man who has been under a lot of self-inflicted stress, who wanted to find someone else to blame and wanted someone to feel sorry for him.

This was sad, desperate and pathetic.

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I do not think anyone is quite sure what Louisville coach Rick Pitino hoped to accomplish with his rant press conference decrying the media coverage of his looming extortion trial and all the tawdry, salacious and crazy details.

If, as he claims in the press conference, it is an appeal to people to ignore any media reports and just wait until the trial so that all will be adjudicated, he failed. He all but guaranteed a new wave of talk, blogging, tweeting and ruminating about the matter on a national scale.

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In the interest of maintaining your sanity, we hereby declare this column a Michael Vick Free Zone. You have to be as tired of reading about him as we are of making fun of him.

Besides, last week provided plenty of other dogs to bark at, highlighted by the love triangle of Rick Pitino, Reggie Miller and John Edwards.

No, they're not in that kind of love triangle. All three just got various comeuppances for fooling around.

Karen Sypher, the woman who is accused of extorting Rick Pitino and is in turn accusing Pitino of sexually assaulting her and encouraging her to get an abortion, has begun speaking out publicly about what she says Pitino did to her.

Sypher and Pitino agree on a few things: That the two met in a Louisville restaurant on August 1, 2003, that they had sexual intercourse on a table in the restaurant that night, that Pitino gave Sypher money a couple weeks later, and that Sypher had an abortion.