Everything Rick Pitino said Thursday

Here is the complete, 4,500-word transcript of all things Louisville coach Rick Pitino had to say, including his candid opinions around the influence of shoe 

companies on AAU teams and zi xiu tang beauty face & figure capsule recruiting, from Thursday's news conference to preview the new season. We've reordered the transcripts to maneuver the full 

comments about the AAU to the second position after his opening statement because they are likely the quotes of the most interest, if you are reading along.

Opening statement

We have kind of a brand new team. We have built a culture the final three years, a great culture of winning, capping off with the winningest class in the 

history of Louisville with last year's class. And today what we're focusing on is building that very same culture, and something of what becomes difficult is 

when you've six or seven beginners, if you have foreign players, it is not only that you have to get them stronger physically and stronger mentally, but 

you're introducing them to a whole new culture.

That is what we're trying to use Anas (Osama Mahmoud) and Matz (Stockman), and it takes a lot of patience whenever you cope with 7-footers because they're 

not ready physically, not ready mentally. The good thing is there exists a starting five that's terrific, really understands the culture, and they're 

obviously doing a very good job of developing it through the bench. The bench at this time 's what really needs to show up.

These Red-White games coming up are likely to tell us a terrible a great deal. Sometimes when you play exhibition games they do not tell you an awful lot, 

however when you play against size and quickness against each other, we're going to know stamina-wise - since there are very few substitutes - who's ready to 

play.

Printed remarks continue below this video of the complete press conference

That's what the Red-White thing is about because the two units play almost the whole game with not many breaks and very few substitutes. So it's per week out 

of this Sunday at 2 o'clock, and we'll know a lot about our basketball team at that time. At this time we're just working our way through everything, getting 

guys fit, getting guys' stamina up to par, focusing on the fundamentals of our style. It'll tell a great deal a week from Sunday.

How can you react to the large Ten's decision to guarantee scholarships essentially in duration? Do you think that's going to be something the ACC has to do?

The players we recruit at our level. (Aside to sports information director Kenny Klein) Kenny, are you able to consider -- I've been here 13 years -- the 

number of players I did not renew within their scholarship? I do not think personally it happened once. There have been times in which the university asked 

people to leave, but I don't believe there's been once. I would say that's the case with nearly every single place. Should you asked somebody who's there 10 

years, it might have happened once or twice. So I think that's more PR than reality. We have a lot of other issues that we should be coping with and 

correcting. That's nice PR lingzhi 3x slimming power for that conference to achieve that, and I'm sure the ACC follows suit like you just mentioned, but it's really more PR than it is 

-- we have other conditions you should be dealing with at this time.