Winners are always vindicated.

Rick Pitino is a moral failure. He’s also a statistical success. As the young Louisville Cardinals gear up for the '09-'10 season, their disgraced coach can’t exactly lecture them on the importance of character—which would be worse news if character were more important in the grading system of college basketball.

Virtue means having to play by someone else’s rules.

Victory, on the other hand, means getting to write your own.

I’m not condoning Pitino’s behavior. Marriage is the most sacred of institutions, and Moses wasn’t kidding about the Seventh Commandment. But let’s not forget that fidelity is a relative concept. In a competition that rewards one contestant for stepping over another, you can’t fault a heel who’s only faithful to himself.

A corrupt tree bears evil fruit.

A corrupt profession breeds evil men.

If Pitino has a fatal flaw, it’s simply that he lives by the letter of his job description.

College hoops history is pocked by scandal. Recruiting violations, academic fraud, the life and times of Bob Huggins—it’s a parade of errors, a case study in sleaze. The reason, of course, is that boosters pay for ends before means. Bible-thumpers will argue that Pitino’s sins reflect poorly on his program. I’d counter that the riches of absolution are just a Final Four berth away.

Purity is good.

Performance is better.

Pitino may be rotten to the core, but at least he keeps things clean in the loss column.

We’re all creatures of circumstance. Conduct is guided by conscience; conscience is grounded in context. The truth is that Rick Pitino doesn’t need me to defend him, because the ethics of his profession have already done the deed. Every scoundrel is selfish in undermining the values of his community. The one with a seven-figure salary should be excused for overestimating the worth of his conceit.

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Hermann Goering never brought home a Big East championship, but he did know a thing or two about the perks of triumph :

The victor will always be the judge, and the vanquished the accused.

Which suggests that Pitino ought not have flinched in the face of Karen Sypher's full-court press.

Because the best defense is a good offense, and any floozie who denounces a .737 career winning percentage is either extorting a cheater or only just saying, is all...