Mar. 25—Men's basketball coach Richard Pitino will be leaving the University of New Mexico and has accepted the head coaching position at Xavier University in the Big East, the Journal confirmed shortly after 8 p.m. on Tuesday night.
Pitino, 42, completed his fourth season at UNM on Sunday night with a 71-63 loss to No. 2 seed Michigan State in the second round of the NCAA Tournament — two days after beating No. 7 Marquette for the Lobos' first win in the NCAA Tournament since 2012.
Pitino was hired in March 2021 after being fired at Minnesota following an eight-year stint at that Big Ten program.
He took over a Lobos team that had won just six games the previous season (only four vs. Division I opponents) and was rated No. 303 in the NCAA's NET rankings.
He had the Lobos back in the NIT in 2023 for the program's first postseason appearance of any kind in nine seasons and back in the NCAA Tournament for the first time in a decade in 2024. This season, the Lobos went 27-8 and won the Mountain West championship and an NCAA Tournament game.
The news of Pitino's departure came on a day star junior point guard Donovan Dent earlier in the day announced he will enter the NCAA transfer portal.
Pitino, whose name had been regularly coming up for jobs this offseason and who had turned down in previous offseasons a job at South Florida and interviewed for, but did not get, the job at Louisville last April.
The Journal has learned Pitino talked this offseason with Virginia, Villanova, VCU and West Virginia.
The Journal has also confirmed through various UNM and donor sources that the offer to keep Pitino at UNM was north of $2 million a year and the coach and new UNM Athletic Director Fernando Lovo had been in regular talks about retaining Pitino for the past two months.
Pitino was paid $1.2 million this season and had a buyout of $750,000 that was reduced by 50% due to a clause stipulating it would be cut in half for an entire contract year if Athletic Director Eddie Nuñez left that post, which he did in August to become AD at Houston.
Lovo said he will immediately launch a national search for Pitino's replacement and has already been working internally on a list of candidates.
This story will be updated.
