In the span of one week last February, Rick Pitino called his debut season at St. John’s “the most unenjoyable experience” of his career — this coming after a loss to Seton Hall — and then, sitting behind a rickety table inside Madison Square Garden following a loss to eventual national champion Connecticut, matter-of-factly described the Red Storm as “not a great basketball team,” deficient in shooting, defense, rebounding and general athletic ability.

“Outside of that, we’re pretty good,” Pitino said.

Anger, frustration and impatience were bubbling toward the surface — directed at his team, his own recruiting efforts and the new landscape of college basketball, where the frenzy of annual player movement had made it “tough to build a program.’

At Boston University, Providence, Kentucky, Louisville and Iona, the 72-year-old Pitino constructed a case for being counted among the finest coaches in the history of the sport. If not his biggest test, the reconstruction of St. John’s promised to be the most unique project of his career: Could Pitino weather these seismic changes to the NCAA model and return another Division I blueblood to national prominence?

One year later, that question has been answered with authority.

The Red Storm won an unshared Big East regular-season championship for the first time since 1985. Won the Big East tournament for the first time since 2000. Won 30 games for the first time since 1986. Lost four games by a combined seven points. Along the way, St. John’s swept and demoralized the Huskies, highlighting the night-and-day difference from Pitino’s debut.

‘This team will be remembered for a long time at St. John’s,’ he said.

St. John’s has reversed more than just one uneven season. A generation of minimal results had moved the program off the national radar and toward the bottom of the Big East. Once one of college basketball’s trendiest teams, the Red Storm had become easy to forget. Now, with the NCAA Tournament around the corner, they’ve become impossible to ignore.

Pitino “is the mastermind behind all of this,” said junior guard RJ Luis, the team’s top scorer at 18.4 points per game. “I mean, it’s truly special. I’m at a loss for words.”

Transfers drive St. John’s turnaround

The No. 2 seed Red Storm will meet No. 15 Nebraska-Omaha on Thursday in the opening round of the West region as one of the hottest teams in the tournament and a legitimate contender to reach the program’s third Final Four and first in 40 years.

This type of rapid turnaround isn’t foreign for Pitino, who coached Providence to the national semifinals in his second season, had Kentucky in the Elite Eight in the program’s first year off NCAA sanctions and led Louisville to the Final Four in his fourth season.

But the reshaping of the Red Storm has been electrified by the same environment Pitino criticized one year ago: the transfer-portal-driven realm of rampant player movement that has helped to immediately flip a mismatched roster.

Five players from last year’s team exhausted their eligibility, including borderline NBA prospects in guard Daniss Jenkins and forward Joel Soriano. Another three players transferred out of the program. In their place came four freshmen and several hugely impactful transfers, led by former Seton Hall guard Kadary Richmond, whom Pitino called “the best guard in the nation.”

Richmond has transformed the pace and flow of the Red Storm’s offense and defense, averaging a box-score-filling 12.7 points, 6.4 rebounds, 5.4 assists and 2.1 steals per game. Former Mississippi State, Georgia Tech and Utah guard Deivon Smith is averaging 9.4 points and 4.8 rebounds per game. Another key transfer, former North Texas guard Aaron Scott, is scoring 8.5 points per game and averaging 1.5 steals per game.

“He’s a big-time player,” Pitino said of Richmond. “Rebounds, points, steals, he always makes big plays.”

Overall, all but two of the nine players averaging at least seven minutes per game since the start of Big East play — true freshman forward Ruben Prey and sophomore guard Simeon Wilcher are the exceptions — began their college careers elsewhere.

‘Last year we had 14 new players. This year we have four new starters,’ said Pitino. ‘The thing that’s difficult for coaches is to get players connected offensively, defensively and bonded, because it takes time.’

The results of this roster turnover have been remarkable, especially on the defensive end of the court.

St. John’s has soared to 31st nationally and first in the Big East in scoring at 65.9 points per game, a 147-spot leap in the Division I rankings from last season. The Red Storm rank 17th in the country in field-goal defense, 17th in steals per game and 10th in turnovers forced per game. This aggressive defense, long a Pitino hallmark, has helped bolster an offense that averaged 78.2 points per game against opponents in this year’s Big East tournament.

“It’s the defense that turns into offense that makes us go,” Pitino said.

Is Pitino the best coach in NCAA history?

He was the first of two coaches to lead three programs to the Final Four; the other, new Arkansas coach and longtime foil John Calipari, could match up with Pitino and St. John’s in the second round should the No. 10 Razorbacks upend No. 7 Kansas.

Pitino is already the only coach to win national championships at two schools and the only coach to lead six programs to the tournament. He holds a career record of 884-310, including 123 wins and three losses vacated by the NCAA for Louisville’s participation in the pay-for-play scandal involving executives at Adidas. With a mark of 54-21 in tournament action, Pitino’s winning percentage of 72 percent is the third-highest among all active coaches.

This is his ninth 30-win season and his 19th team to crack the top eight of The Associated Press poll, and just the third to do so when entering the regular season unranked, joining Kentucky in 1990-91 and Louisville in 2002-3.

And while a huge chunk of his college success has come at historically elite programs, Pitino has never directly inherited a winner. The six programs Pitino has coached went a combined 76-105 in the year before his arrival. Most notably, Kentucky was burdened with a two-year postseason ban and scholarship restrictions due to NCAA violations that occurred under his predecessor.

While he has pushed back on questions about his legacy and place in the all-time-great conversation, Pitino’s latest turnaround at St. John’s reinforces an incontrovertible fact that had come to be overshadowed by his off-court scandals and failed NBA forays: No coach in college basketball history has won this much at this many different stops.

“Humility is a big part of my life right now,” he said. “It wasn’t always that way. I don’t believe in redemption. I believe in humility. I believe in living what I call the precious present, a gift that we all get.”

Star-studded West region will test St. John’s

To reach the Final Four, St. John’s will have to navigate a deep region topped by No. 1 Florida and several powerhouse programs and teams: Kansas, Arkansas, No. 3 Texas Tech, No. 4 Maryland, No. 5 Memphis and No. 6 Missouri. Also in the West are the No. 8 Huskies, now almost two years removed from the program’s last postseason loss.

That there is still a degree of uncertainty over how the Red Storm will fare against this caliber of competition stems from a weaker regular-season strength of schedule than other prime contenders for the national championship.

St. John’s went 6-4 in games against Quad 1 competition, playing the fewest such games and posting the fewest wins of any team on the tournament’s top four lines. Four of these Quad 1 wins came in the final month of the regular season, two in the Big East tournament.

But these recent wins illustrate why St. John’s could be a difficult matchup for any potential opponent in this year’s bracket.

Trailing Creighton 41-38 with 12:53 to play in the Big East championship, the Red Storm made 14 field goals in a row over the next seven minutes to take a 70-55 lead, eventually connecting on 17 of their final 19 attempts and 23-of-32 overall in the second half.

“They’ve had a remarkable year,” Creighton coach Greg McDermott said. “Dominated our league and pretty much saved their best for this conference tournament. They just wear into you over time.”

One night earlier, in the semifinals against Marquette, St. John’s forced 17 turnovers against the Golden Eagles’ six assists. Down 24-9 early, the Red Storm outscored Marquette 44-26 in the second half to win 79-63.

“I think they’re about as dangerous as anyone,” Marquette coach Shaka Smart said. “What you have seen from their team is they’ve gotten better and better on the offensive end as the year has gone on because they’ve got guys that have really, really bought into their roles.”

But no result from this season speaks to the program’s resurgence more than a pair of flip-the-script takedowns of the two-time defending national champions. The second, an 89-75 win at MSG last month, saw St. John’s go 8 of 16 from 3-point range in the first half to stun the Huskies, who had stuffed the lane and dared the Red Storm to connect from deep.

“You’ve got to pick your poison,” UConn coach Dan Hurley said. “If they shoot the ball like that from the perimeter, they’re going to be a problem for anyone.”

That theory will be put to the test this weekend and beyond, should St. John’s carry over a red-hot close to the regular season. The Red Storm have lost just once this calendar year, by two points at Villanova in early February. Like the teams at each of Pitino’s previous stops, they’re clearly improving with every passing game, every passing week — and like his championship-winning teams at Kentucky and Louisville, the Red Storm are capable of cutting down the nets in San Antonio early next month.

“I think we can win every game,” said Deivon Smith. “Even the games we lost, we’re hard on ourselves because we’re only losing by a point or so. It’s a super-special team, making history almost every single game.”

It was never just about Caitlin Clark.

No doubt there are people who thought women’s basketball would fade back to niche sports status without Clark and the white-hot spotlight that follows her. That the boom of the last few years was solely from people who tuned in to watch Clark drain 3s from the logo and break records.

Tiger Woods aside, however, sports booms are rarely driven by only one athlete and the explosion of interest in women’s basketball is no different. The proof is in the numbers:

At least half a dozen games drew 1 million or more viewers this season, led by the 2.23 million who tuned in to watch JuJu Watkins vs. Paige Bueckers, err, USC vs. UConn, in December. That game was the second-most-watched women’s game ever on Fox. There were 15 games just on ESPN that drew 500,000-plus viewers.
ESPN’s ratings for women’s basketball were up 3% from last year – and a whopping 41% from two years ago.
Ratings for the ACC tournament were up 23% from last year, while the Big 12 saw a 126% increase for its tournament.
South Carolina, Iowa and UConn sold out their season tickets, with the Gamecocks and Hawkeyes ranking in the top 15 of all NCAA programs, men’s or women’s, in average attendance.
The average price for a 30-second spot in this year’s NCAA championship game has more than doubled from last year, going for almost $440,000, according to Sports Business Journal. Most ad spots for the entire tournament have sold out.

The tournament began Wednesday night with the First Four. First-round games begin Friday.

‘Women’s sports are a thing now,’ said Jane McManus, author of ‘The Fast Track: Inside the Surging Business of Women’s Sports.’

‘There are hardcore football, baseball or (men’s) basketball fans who are always going to be antagonistic to women’s sports. For those who aren’t antagonistic, there’s a sense women’s sports are now in the pool of sports,’ McManus said. ‘That’s a real change. When you hit that generalized sports interest, more fans are going to encounter. It just becomes part of the sports landscape, and I think that’s what’s happening with women’s sports now.

‘Once people hear about it, it’s hard to un-ring that bell.’

Especially because the recent progress has led to foundational changes that will generate more growth.

For years, teams in the men’s tournament have earned ‘units” for every game they played, money that can eventually be put back into their programs. Last year, each unit was worth about $2 million.

Until this season, women’s teams didn’t get units because the NCAA said their tournament didn’t have a large enough unique revenue stream. (The men’s units are based on the monster media rights deal with CBS.) But the NCAA’s latest media rights deal with ESPN includes a specific valuation for the women’s basketball tournament, $65 million, paving the way for the women to finally get paid like the men do.

The fund is $15 million, so the payouts will be smaller initially. Still, it’s a start. Schools will be able to use that money for facilities, recruiting, coaches’ salaries — all things imperative to the continued growth of the game.

‘It really gives the women a seat at the table,” said Atlantic 10 commissioner Bernadette McGlade, who was on the women’s basketball committee when it first requested units a quarter-century ago.

And it won’t just be that money that schools will have to invest. There are corporate partners and prospective sponsors who now direct their money specifically to women’s sports, because they recognize the return on investment is higher.

‘Money does talk, and it opens doors. It elevates respect,’ McGlade said. ‘I think that women’s sports have turned the corner. Absolutely. And I don’t think there’s any downturn that’s going to happen.”

It doesn’t hurt that the women’s game went right from Clark and Angel Reese to Watkins and Bueckers. The two are commercial stars with solid name recognition — something that can’t be said about many in the men’s tournament beyond Cooper Flagg.

That’s another area that will ensure the women’s game continues to grow. Unlike the men, who can, and often do, leave college after a year, women have to be at least 22 years old and have either exhausted their eligibility, graduated or be four years removed from high school to enter the WNBA draft. That means the public has the time to get to know these players and become invested in them.

Bueckers played in three Final Fours in her first four years at UConn (she missed the 2022-23 season with a torn ACL) and won her first ESPY after her freshman season. Watkins is only a sophomore, and already fans show up to her road games wearing her jersey and sporting her signature ‘JuJu Bun.’

‘That’s a really neat thing. I think it has cultural significance,” USC coach Lindsay Gottlieb said.

‘Caitlin Clark wasn’t the first great player, and she wasn’t the first incredible personality. But she was the first one that got that kind of coverage and galvanized things in a really significant way,’ Gottlieb said. ‘So I do think … to roll right into the players that are in our game now, Juju and the other big stars, the synergy of that has worked well to not have there be a letdown.”

The interest in women’s basketball might not be at the heights it was under Clark. But it continues to grow. There’s no going back now.

Follow USA TODAY Sports columnist Nancy Armour on social media @nrarmour.

The NFL loves average.

Just won the Super Bowl? Sorry, you’re going to the very back of the draft line – in every round. Amassing too much talent on that roster? Sorry, but the salary cap will ensure you can’t keep all of it – this ain’t the 1980s. Racking up too many victories? Sorry, but your schedule will very likely be appreciably harder next season – especially as it relates to your divisional foes.

Regression to the mean fosters football chaos – sorry, I meant competitive balance. It’s part of the league’s not-so-secret sauce, offering hope to all 32 fan bases – often beyond the winter solstice for many – and why the playoff field typically changes so significantly year over year.

Yet this is also the very reason to reward teams that manage to remain a standard deviation or two beyond average – and I’m talking about the good ones, not the New York Jets. If you can achieve excellence in the NFL, you should be applauded for it.

This is why I was heartened to see Wednesday that the Detroit Lions, a franchise long relegated (until very recently) to middling if not the Jets’ side of the bell curve, proposed a change to the league’s present postseason format that I’ve thought was long overdue – namely compensating the best teams with better seeds and home playoff games rather than (mindlessly?) rewarding those that merely win divisions.

The Lions are asking the NFL “to amend the current playoff seeding format to allow Wild Card teams to be seeded higher than Division Champions if the Wild Card team has a better regular season record.”

Detroit’s plan further lays out that higher-seeded teams host postseason games, regardless of whether they’re division champions or wild-card entries. The proposal will be voted upon by owners at the March 30 league meeting in Palm Beach, Florida.

Let’s go back to the ‘80s (and ‘90s) again. It was a time when things like network news, landlines and Congress mattered. It’s also when the NFL was constructed of six divisions – RIP, AFC Central and NFC Central – most of them comprised of at least five clubs. That meant fully half of a team’s 16-game regular-season schedule – RIP, 16-game schedule – was spent matching up with divisional foes and rendered a first-place finish a little more consequential and its guaranteed home playoff game perhaps a touch more meaningful.

Nowadays?

The NFL went to eight four-team divisions when it expanded to 32 franchises in 2002 – hello, Houston Texans; RIP, Houston Oilers – which meant clubs only spent 37.5% of the schedule competing against their traditional rivals. That figure dropped to 35.2% when the 17th game was added in 2021 (and we know an 18th isn’t too far off).

The modern math indicates that when a division is consistently ruled by a nine-win team – looking at you, Tampa Bay Buccaneers – it’s actually just a bad division, not a case where a bunch of good squads are beating the [tar] out of one another the way the Dallas Cowboys, New York Giants, Philadelphia Eagles and Washington ________ did … back when such a thing was allowed in the body bag heyday of the 1980s and ‘90s NFC East, which also included the always irrelevant (RIP) St. Louis/Phoenix Cardinals.

Mediocrity in the 21st-century NFL is too easily elevated.

Let’s drill down a bit more on the NFC South. The Bucs have won it each of the past four seasons, meaning they’ve been assured at least one home playoff game all of those years. Should that have been the case, though? Not once in that period has the NFC South produced a wild-card team – its most recent one actually the 2020 Tom Brady-led Bucs who won Super Bowl 55. Over the past three seasons, Tampa Bay’s regular-season record is 27-24 (9-8 its average record). Yet the Bucs have wound up with the third or fourth playoff seed each time, even though their overall conference record has never been better than sixth – and was tied for ninth in 2022.

And this isn’t some recent anomaly.

Remember when the NFC West used to be shaded like the NFC South is now? Cris Collinsworth infamously called the 2008 Arizona Cardinals the “worst playoff team” ever before that postseason, when circumstances ultimately permitted those Cards to host two playoff games on their way to Super Bowl 43, which they lost to the Pittsburgh Steelers. Two years later, the Seattle Seahawks, led by backup QB Charlie Whitehurst on ‘Sunday Night Football,’ won the final game of the 2010 regular season – beating the St. Louis Rams (RIP) to finish with a 7-9 record … which was good enough to win the division. A week later, the ‘Hawks somehow managed to knock off the high-octane New Orleans Saints in the wild-card round, in large part because QB Matt Hasselbeck was healthy enough to play but also because they got to host the game at raucous Qwest Field (RIP) on the day Marshawn Lynch registered his famous “Beast Quake” run.

Those are fun trips down memory lane – the division-winning 2014 Carolina Panthers (7-8-1) and 2020 Washington Football Team (7-9) provided no such nostalgia – but it’s worth wondering if the moments should have ever occurred. With the NFL playoff field now ballooning to 14 games, average postseason qualifiers have become commonplace. And that’s fine. After all, this is the time of year when everyone likes to see the Ohio Valley Conference team go on a bracket-busting run. But let’s make ’em earn it without greasing the skids.

And there’s a flip side to all of this.

Is the arc of the football universe bending toward justice when the Minnesota Vikings finish 14-3 – as they did last year, the most regular-season wins ever by a wild-card team – but are seeded fifth with basically no hope of playing a postseason game in front of their home fans even though they’d tied for the NFC’s second-best record? Unrelated – but related – a similarly wonky seeding system led to unexpected (unfair?) outcomes in the new College Football Playoff earlier this year, when Boise State and Arizona State were slotted third and fourth, respectively, by virtue of winning weak conferences. (Neither team was in the top seven of the final regular season Top 25 poll.)

In each of the last three NFL postseasons, at least one wild-card team in both the AFC and NFC has had a superior record to the division-winning No. 4 seed and, in many cases, multiple clubs have been better. I’m not suggesting winning a division shouldn’t lead to automatic playoff qualification – that ought to remain the case – but those so-called champions should have to earn the higher seed and home dates that come with them. The whole point of seeding is to create the best possible matchups as a bracket reduces, otherwise what’s the point? Furthermore, chasing seeds also makes for more compelling games in Week 18 rather than a bunch of teams resting on their laurels while taking de facto byes rather than earning the real thing.

Which brought me to another realization and belated point.

When I saw this proposal had come from the Lions, my first – naïve – reaction was that they’d felt some sort of compassion for their NFC North brethren Vikings, whom Detroit swept last season to win the division and No. 1 playoff seed. There was also that caught-on-camera moment at Ford Field in Week 18, when the Lions beat the Vikes in the regular-season finale and Detroit coach Dan Campbell told Minnesota counterpart Kevin O’Connell, “I’ll see you in two weeks,” an innocuous but nevertheless highly parsed comment made following the heat of battle – and also one that would have been true had the seeding held to form. (It didn’t. The Vikings lost to the NFC West champion Los Angeles Rams in their playoff opener but would not have faced the Lions a third time in the divisional round anyway given the third-seeded Bucs were upset – at home – by the sixth-seeded the Washington Commanders, who subsequently ambushed Detroit, too. Notably, the Buccaneers and Rams would have been the NFC’s lowest seeds in 2024 based on the Lions’ recommendation.)

Even though the matchups didn’t materialize as they were designed to, it does become apparent that the Lions’ proposal would also generally benefit their self-interests – and No. 1 seeds should be deservedly granted plenty of indulgence, beyond earning a first-round bye and home-field advantage. The NFL’s playoffs dictate that the highest seed always hosts the lowest remaining seed as the rounds progress. But the current set-up would have theoretically meant that Detroit would have played the wild-card Vikings a third time, despite Minnesota’s gaudy record, even though the higher-seeded Rams and Bucs both finished 10-7 and would have been – logically, if not practically in this case – more attractive matchups for a top-seeded host team.

The NFL is nothing if not an organism that constantly evolves in a bid to create a more attractive product. And that includes occasional tweaking of a playoff system that’s generally been the best in professional sports for the last half-century or so given its one-and-done nature. But it’s not always perfect. (Remember, the undefeated ’72 Dolphins somehow had to go on the road to win the AFC championship game back when it was hosted on a rotational basis rather than a merit-based one.)

But when there’s a good reason to embrace excellence and champion meritocracy in a sport largely designed to suppress it, let’s celebrate that. RIP average division winners who don’t deserve more built-in advantages when they matter most.

All NFL news on and off the field. Sign up for USA TODAY’s 4th and Monday newsletter.