Hiring a coach from “in the family” is as risky as it is tempting, and Louisville is the latest to learn that lesson the hard way. Few things are more painful for a program than having to fire a beloved alum who helped win a national championship as a player. He’s not some hired gun. He’s one of you. But just 64 games into Kenny Payne’s coaching career, with only a dozen total wins and at least twice that many unthinkable losses, there was no other choice left for the Cardinals and athletic director Josh Heird.
Louisville is expected to fire Payne after a 94-85 loss to N.C. State in the first round of the ACC tournament, according to multiple reports. It was the Cardinals’ eighth consecutive loss and 15th in the final 17 games of the season. Fans long ago turned on Payne, some of them openly heckling him at games recently but most of them expressing their displeasure by simply staying away. The downtown KFC Yum! Center, which holds more than 20,000 people, has been nearly empty all season.
“When I walked into the program as the new head coach, I talked about I needed everybody on the same page,” Payne said following the loss to N.C. State. “We sort of forgot that. I talked about how I’m not going to let you blame me. I’m not standing up here by myself. I need all of Louisville with me. We sort of forgot that.
“Whether I’m the coach or not, I can look in the mirror and say I gave it everything I had to help this program.”
It would’ve been far more costly to keep Payne, who signed a six-year, $20 million contract in March of 2022, than to pay the $8 million buyout for termination without cause. “Cause” is a legal term, which in this case means cheating or some other impropriety, and there’s never been a whiff of that with Payne. Merely losing — even at unprecedented levels — doesn’t constitute cause. But all that losing certainly prompted the early separation.
The Cardinals have cratered to a shocking degree and with dizzying speed, punctuated by home losses to Chattanooga and Arkansas State and an even more embarrassing defeat at the hands of DePaul, the 315th-rated team in Division I. Last season, it was home losses to Bellarmine, Wright State, Appalachian State and Lipscomb. Payne’s team also lost an exhibition game to a D-II school in the last two preseasons. Louisville, a proud program with 10 Final Fours and three national championships in school history went 5-35 in ACC play under Payne.
There are many shocking stats to illustrate how bad it got, but this one seems almost unbelievable: The Cardinals only won one game away from home in two years.
It feels like a lifetime ago now that Payne was a rising star and Louisville basketball was nationally relevant, but it wasn’t. A little more than four years ago, under previous coach Chris Mack, Louisville was ranked No. 1 in the AP Top 25. Payne was still a star assistant coach at rival Kentucky then — he’d soon leave for an assistant coaching job with the New York Knicks — a man universally praised for his prowess in both recruiting and development. “One of the best development coaches in the world,” former No. 1 pick Karl-Anthony Towns told The Athletic back then. “KP is why I’m able to play so well in the paint now,” fellow No. 1 pick Anthony Davis said. “Kenny is the backbone,” said Willie Cauley-Stein, another of the lottery pick big men Payne tutored at Kentucky.
Somehow, though, none of that translated when he finally got his first head-coaching shot at Louisville, where he played for Denny Crum, won the 1986 NCAA title and became a first-round draft pick. Payne, 57, did not gobble up five-star talent as expected, the way he did at Kentucky, and suffered a big early defeat on the trail when he couldn’t land McDonald’s All-American DJ Wagner despite hiring his grandfather and former U of L teammate Milt Wagner. DJ Wagner chose John Calipari and the Wildcats instead. That turned out to be the highest-profile example of many recruiting failures with both traditional high school prospects and in the transfer portal.
Payne’s teams have been consistently outmanned but also out-coached, which was ultimately his downfall. It became difficult to discern Louisville’s game plan on a given night, and the coach’s clumsy attempts at postgame explanations often infuriated the fan base. Those fans began voting with their wallets, abandoning an arena that has long been the jewel of downtown, which meant the Cardinals’ rapid descent into irrelevance became not only depressing in a psychological sense but also an economic one.
Sometimes, the bottom line is just the actual bottom line. And so, as hard as it was for Louisville to part with one of its own, it finally reached a point where it would’ve been more painful to let him continue.
Required reading
(Photo: Andy Lyons / Getty Images)
