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Message: [QUOTE="UConnNick, post: 3098513, member: 1526"] One word...money. It's a commuter school with lousy academics, but the people who live in Louisville are insanely loyal to the school, whether they have any direct connection to it or not. Over half the student body is from Jefferson County, living at home with mommy and daddy. It started out in the 1920's as a municipal college. The state took it over many years later, 1960's I think. That may explain the local, blindly loyal fanbase. The school can do no wrong. For many years the school allowed the AD to be run totally autonomously from the rest of the school. Jurich is a Las Vegas gambling type. Nobody was watching, so he got away with bloody murder. He surrounded himself with yes men and like minded creeps. It's no wonder Petrino and Pitino worked for him. They were just as sleazy as he was, maybe even more so. The school used the AD to raise its national profile, the same thing UCONN did when the men's and women's BB programs took off in the early 1990's. UCONN parlayed its sudden national notoriety into finally getting the state legislature to pony up the $$$ to rebuild its horribly neglected campus, which has transformed the entire school. Louisville's problem is they did it by breaking every conceivable rule, both financially and otherwise, with no oversight. And it's still a lousy academic commuter school, although they're improving on that to some extent. You do have to grudgingly admire Jurich for one thing. He elevated the school's profile and completely blindsided UCONN's passive administration to worm his way into the ACC. We were up against a riverboat gambling type with nothing to lose. We sat by and watched him get a fourth rate academic institution, with a history of NCAA cheating in a class by itself, into the ACC. [/QUOTE]

Verification: First name of men's bb coach