Rick Pitino Calls a News Conference; Does It Have Anything to Do With These Tapes?

Things seemed to have cooled down on the Rick Pitino front, at least on a national level, in the last few weeks. The sports world moved on to other pursuits like Brett Favre. So the news today from ESPN's Pat Forde that Pitino has called 3 p.m. ET news conference is confusing.

If you wanted to hazard a guess as to why we're getting a news conference today, you could look straight to these Karen Sypher tapes that were released today found on WLKY.com. Even that would seem to be a bit of a stretch as many of the comments had already made their way into the press, including comments about her not wanting an abortion, threats against her child and the fact that she Karen Sypher believes her husband Tim Sypher married her to keep her quiet.

Karen Sypher audio (MP3 files): Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

I'll keep updating this post as we get to the 3 p.m. ET news conference at Louisville. For now, listen to the tapes. (I'm only through the first of four parts, so I'll add to this post as more interesting nuggets come up.)

Part 2 of the tape sounds like a second visit to Metro Police where she actually initiates the investigation. Part 3 of the call stems from Sypher seeing a report that Pitino took a lie detector test.

UPDATE: There will be a live stream on the Courier-Journal site.

UPDATE 2: Pitino has finished his brief appearance with the media, which lasted about eight minutes. We'll have another post shortly.

This post originally appeared on the Sporting Blog. For more, see The Sporting Blog Archives.