LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – It was as strange a day as I remember in Louisville men’s basketball history, and there have been a few strange ones in the past decade. Chris Mack, 14 games (not counting six games for which he was suspended by the school) into his fourth season as Cardinals’ coach, announced that he was leaving the program.
One day he's the coach, the next he's gone. And he's out of the game for two years.
Until now. On Friday night, word came out that Mack is coming back to the college game. Field of 68 was the first to report that after Louisville hired College of Charleston’s Pat Kelsey, a former Mack assistant, as its new coach, Charleston will hire Mack to replace him. It will be Mack’s first coaching job since leaving Louisville on Jan. 26, 2022.
That day marked a stunning scene. Mack’s troubled final season began with the unusual move of a university suspending its own head coach (for the manner in which he fired an assistant and longtime mentor, Dino Gaudio, which wound up in a bizarre extortion conviction for Gaudio) and ended with five losses in six games, in which it became evident that either Mack’s heart wasn’t in it, his players’ hearts weren’t in it, or both.
"I think it's just it's been building, you know," Mack said at the time. "Obviously we all want the best for Louisville, you know, and I still do. And that's not going to change. It's not really important when any of that stuff. What's important is that these guys (players) need to be able to be connected. And I'm humble enough that if I'm not the right person, all good. I just want the best for them.”
Mack moved on from his coaching job to full-time father mode. He showed up at a Louisville game or two as part of team trips his daughters made to ballgames. The family settled in a home in Hurstbourne, then moved on to Florida to further the volleyball development of his daughter Hailee, who has signed with Vanderbilt.
But his name had recently begun to surface in connection with open coaching jobs.
"For the first time since the whole Louisville time, I'm going to look at the options and see what's out there, and see if it’s a good fit. And if it is, it's probably something that I'll end up jumping back into,” Mack told television station FOX 19 in Cincinnati last month. “I’ve learned a lot from the two coaching jobs that I was fortunate enough to be a part of so, you know, we will see.”
Mack was rumored to be a candidate at Vanderbilt, but the SEC school selected James Madison’s Mark Byington as coach earlier this week.
Out of the game for two seasons, Mack comes to back to a college basketball landscape that has been seismically altered. NIL is the driving force in recruiting. The transfer portal has been supercharged with the addition of money for players.
When Mack came to Louisville, he was viewed as a top up-and-coming coach in the game. He had led Xavier to a No. 1 overall seed, a Big East championship and had been to the Elite Eight in 2017. He had a National Coach of the Year award on his shelf.
At Louisville, Mack compiled a record of 63-36 in his three-plus seasons, including a 24-7 mark in the COVID-shortened 2019-20 season when there was no NCAA Tournament. That team was slated for a No. 4 seed, after climbing as high as No. 1 in the Associated Press poll early in the season.
The next season brought more difficulty, a 13-7 record after the team was hit hard by COVID. When the Cardinals failed to make the NCAA Tournament, Mack fired assistants Luke Murray and Gaudio. Murray wound up at UConn, where he was part of last season’s NCAA Championship run, and could be part of another this season. Gaudio reacted angrily, and confronted Mack in his office in an argument that Mack secretly recorded on his phone and later turned over to the university.
On the day Gaudio pled guilty to extortion as the result of that conversation, the university sanctioned Mack for improper handling of the termination of an assistant. Sitting in for Mack, Mike Pegues won five of the Cardinals’ first six games. In Mack’s first game back, Louisville lost at Michigan State. Two games later it lost to DePaul, and two games after that it lost by 10 to Western Kentucky.
Mack went 6-8 before a deal was struck for his departure, then Louisville won just two of its final 12 games under Pegues.
Kenny Payne took over as coach after that season.
Mack seemed in no hurry to return. He is paid $133,000 per month by Louisville, after his $4.8 million separation settlement. The coach was not sanctioned in a subsequent NCAA ruling on three minor violations reported by Gaudio in the aftermath of his firing.
At Louisville Mack was no doubt a victim of timing. COVID-19 wreaked havoc with what he was building, kept him from what was shaping up to be a decent NCAA Tournament run, and scrambled recruiting efforts not only at Louisville, but everywhere. He was in Louisville during a time of great social unrest in the wake of the police shooting of Breonna Taylor, which grabbed the attention of everyone who lived here, and college students more than most.
Mack came in a time of leadership transition at the university, and people here wouldn't see the extent of it, likely, until the athletic director who hired him, Vince Tyra, and the university president, Neeli Bendapudi, announced resignation within days of each other.
And Mack was a victim of his own frustration. Stung by his program’s failure to make the NCAA Tournament in 2021, he moved to fire two trusted assistants, one a longtime mentor, and another who wound up being part of an NCAA championship just two seasons later.
Mack did not come to Louisville for a short stay. He built the kind of home here that you live in for a long time. But Mack also deserves credit for being able to read the room, whether it was his own locker room or the boardroom of the university for which he worked. And, it should be said, he was able to read his own heart and mind.
At Charleston, he’ll take over a program poised to jump from the Coastal Athletic Association to the Atlantic 10, which was Xavier’s home before it made the move to the Big East.
For Mack, it’s a detour no one expected when he arrived in Louisville as one of the hottest names in coaching. But it’s also a new start, and a chance to rekindle a promising coaching career. His hope will be that time off has helped him recover from the timing of an opportunity gone wrong.
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