Yes, Pitino committed crimes against morality, but his job is to win games. He wasn’t hired to be a monk. He was hired to beat Kentucky.

His players, no doubt, received the wrong message from their coach in his admitted affair with Karen Sypher after-hours at a restaurant, yet Pitino was hired to teach them about chemistry, not anatomy. His players should have their moral compasses adjusted by their parents and their church, not a coach who’ll only be in their lives for three or four years. Although Pitino does have a responsibility to serve as a role model to his players, sleeping around doesn’t have much legal ground to stand on, in terms of termination. Trust me: Plenty of coaches have done this; most just were lucky enough not to get caught or, in Pitino’s case, leveled by a possible extortion attempt. If sports fired all the domestic cheaters among coaches, half the benches in basketball would be patrolled by men wearing not suits, but clerical collars.

Again: That’s not right, not wrong.

Pitino must be fired if his moral lapse leads to a job performance lapse. That’s fair game. That’s where Louisville would have every right to cut the cord, and there’s a chance this may happen. The grief Pitino will get on the road, especially in Lexington, could be unrelenting. That kind of verbal abuse would affect anyone. Even more, you wonder how this harms recruiting. How much ammunition did Pitino just give to rival coaches, who follow no rules when it comes to sliming the competition in the slimy recruiting game? Will parents with strong convictions steer their kids away from Louisville? What about the image of the program? This is when the Pitino episode will be worth watching, instead of now, when you can’t even hear the squeaks of sneakers in the gym yet.

You could almost see what came next. Pitino called a press conference, apologized to his family, players and the university, and now the school will take a wait-and-see approach with the public.

And the locals will be in a forgiving mood as long as Louisville gets to the tourney and wins a few games once there, because basketball does that to people in those parts.

It all comes down to winning, once again in the sports bubble, which is insulated from the real world. Pitino might be 0-1 right now at home, his home, but he’d better turn it around by November.

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Mark J. Terrill / AP

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