Rick Pitino Has Eleven Assistant Coaches?

Apparently so. With the hiring of Indianapolis high school coach Shabaka Lands, the Louisville coaching staff has ballooned to a whopping eleven. Does every player need a personal coach?

Lands, an assistant for Indianapolis' Pike High, also (surprise!) happens to have a close relationship with one of the best college basketball prospects in the country, Marquis Teague.

From ESPN's Andy Katz:

Lands' job description has been termed "special assistant to the head coach." Pike High is the home of one of the nation's top recruits for 2011 in Marquis Teague, named the top point guard in the class by ESPNU's Super 60 and the No. 4 player overall. Teague is the younger brother of current Atlanta Hawk and former Wake Forest guard Jeff Teague and the son of Shawn Teague, a former player for Pitino at Boston University.

On the surface, it looks like Pitino hired Lands to get Teague, or at the very least to land a high-profile recruit in the wake of Pitino's scandal involving Karen Sypher's alleged extortion of the coach after their 2003 extramarital indiscretion. But Pike High head coach Phil Spoljaric said there are at least two reasons to dismiss the perception, even if the timing is suspicious: Spoljaric was informed that Lands was going to Louisville in July (before Pitino's police interviews on the Sypher "encounter" were made public), and if Lands and Teague were a package deal, then the commitment would already be done.

"Is Louisville where he'll end up? I don't know, but I don't think it will affect it in the end," Spoljaric said.

This trend is becoming disturbingly common in college basketball. Sure, there are stories like that of Dalonte Hill, the Kansas State assistant that arrived as part of a package deal with Michael Beasley (unofficially, of course) and parlayed his ties to DC Assault into a number of subsequent commitments from other prospects. But still, it's an unseemly practice, and one which (so far) the NCAA's been unable to regulate.

Especially in terms of promoting parity, it's a trend that chips away at the fairness of the recruiting process. Not every program can afford to add coaches every time they're recruiting the new best point guard in the country. Whether it's Kansas adding Mario Chalmers' father as an assistant coach, Baylor adding one of John Wall's coaches to its staff (which ultimately backfired; Wall ended up at Kentucky) or a coach giving a scholarship to a lesser player, but close friend of a top prospect. When does this stuff become openly crooked?

It's not technically cheating, but it certainly seems to undermine the spirit of the the regulations. With more and more star players expecting this sort of accomadation, there's sure to be some sort of tipping point. How many assistants will Rick Pitino or John Calipari add before someone decides to do something? 13? 15? 17? Should be interesting...