Louisville hires Shabaka Lands

Earlier this summer, Louisville hired Ralph Willard, formerly the head coach at Holy Cross and a close friend and confidant of Rick Pitino, as their new associate head coach.

This was on the heels of Pitino's son Richard leaving for Florida (Louisville also lost two other members of their staff during the off-season).

A lot of people, including myself, questioned the intelligence of this hiring. Essentially, the thought process was that Louisville was losing one of the best young recruiters in the game with the younger Pitino leaving. The elder Pitino is an x's-and-o's mastermind, and while hiring an experienced coach like Willard to bounce ideas off of is something any coach would dream of, the consensus seemed to be that it was more important for the Cardinals to sign a coach that would bring top-tier talent into the program.

Because, when it comes down to it, having a roster full of talent is the most important aspect of coaching a college team. Great coaching will win a game, a talented roster will put banners in the rafters.

On Monday, the Cardinals may have solved part of that problem as they hired Shabaka Lands as a special assistant to the head coach.

This isn't just any ordinary signing. Lands' (who has no college coaching experience) previous job was as an assistant coach at Pike High School in Indianapolis. That just so happens to be the high school that guys like Courtney Lee, Robert Vaden, Notre Dame's Chris Thomas, and Arizona's Jason Gardner went to. Their current star: Marquis Teague, Rivals #2 recruit in the class of '11 and brother of Wake Forest star and NBA lottery pick Jeff Teague. Louisville is currently in a recruiting battle with Indiana and Kentucky, among others, for Teague's services.

Sounds a bit shady, doesn't it? Common sense would say that hiring the high school (or AAU) coach or a family member of a recruit they are targeting would in some way violate an NCAA rule, wouldn't it?

Yes.

But the practice of package deals is not only legal, it is commonplace - there are too many examples to name (starting with Kansas hiring Danny Manning's father in the mid-80's all the way up to Baylor signing John Wall's AAU coach last summer). It is just another example (in a summer full of them) of how shady and corrupt the basketball recruiting process is.

The interesting part about the situation is that Louisville may not have even needed to try and gain this edge. Teague's father, Shawn, played for Pitino at Boston University.

The signing comes of the heels of Marquis taking an official visiting Kentucky. He is expected to visit Louisville sometime in the coming month.