Hiring Kenny Payne checked all the boxes, but Louisville basketball losses keep piling up.

I must admit, when Josh Heird announced that he was hiring Kenny Payne to be the new men’s basketball coach at U of L, I thought it was a brilliant coup. Here’s a guy in Payne who checked all the boxes. He was an alum. He was a former U of L player. He won a national championship here, so he knows what it takes to win at the highest level. He played four years in the NBA for Philadelphia, was an assistant coach at Oregon and then at Kentucky with John Calipari. He had a reputation as an excellent recruiter. He was even an assistant coach for the NBA New York Knicks. By all accounts he is a good human being too and a very, very nice person. Check, check and check-itty check. What a pedigree!

With those credentials he looked like a brilliant hire. All that was left to do was let him loose and watch the blue chippers and those ACC championships start rolling in!

As it turns out, there was just one teensy problem: He’s not a very good head coach.

Kenny Payne gets it: There are no quick fixes for U of L. What he needs is time and support.

Kenny Payne's losses keep piling up

His first year, as the losses piled up, he let us know that he inherited a bunch of players that weren’t his. He went four and 28. That’s okay. Well, it’s not, but we’ll write that one off, I guess. This year had more promise. All he needed to do was get a couple good transfers from the portal, maybe a promising hotshot freshman or two and build his team around those he kept from last year. Remember, he’s known as a good recruiter, so it shouldn’t have been hard to get just four “difference makers.” It’s much more difficult to turn a football program around because you need so many portal players and new recruits. Jeff Brohm did it and he had impressive success in his very first year.

Payne didn’t bring in any real whiz kids as far as I can tell. Nor has he coached the ones he has into better players. They are undisciplined on the court and play with inexplicable and frequent bursts of apathy at times. Kenny Payne doesn’t have control of the team. Can you imagine a player refusing to play for Rick Pitino until he got the brand of tights he wanted?

Not many years ago, U of L was consistently one of the top three money making programs in the country. Today most of the seats sit empty and money bleeds out of the program, which puts all the other programs, except football, at risk.

Perhaps someday Kenny Payne will be a top-drawer head coach, but basketball is a big business and U of L cannot afford to let him earn while he learns. They just can’t. A change will have to be made sometime between now and when U of L is officially excluded from the NCAA Tournament in March. To quote another U of L coach from another era, “The only variable is time.”

Bill Lamb worked in television for most of his career before retiring in 2022. Most recently he was the Senior Vice President and General Manager of KTTV and KCOP, two Fox owned television stations in Los Angeles. Before that he was the President and General Manager of WDRB and WBKI in Louisville and the Vice-President of Broadcast Operations for Block Communications, Inc. overseeing nine television stations. In 2018, Bill was inducted into the Kentucky Broadcasting Hall of Fame. Lamb will write commentary regularly for The Courier Journal.

This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: Coach Kenny Payne is bad for U of L basketball. A change must be made.