Let's play a game of Name This Coach:

No matter what the coach did, he couldn't seem to match the legacy of success Rick Pitino left at Kentucky.

After one solitary Final Four trip, his best teams lost out in the NCAA Tournament round of eight.

There were too many double-digit-loss seasons to suit a fan base historically accustomed to better.

It was a summer tradition for the coach to promise that, in the upcoming basketball season, his team would play at a racehorse tempo. Yet when the winter came, the reality never quite seemed to match the vow.

As his coaching tenure approached its 10th year, the coach's program seemed at risk of crossing to the wrong side of the stagnation line.

Answer: Tubby Smith in his final years at UK?

Many would say so.

Yet all the above descriptions just as accurately reflect Rick Pitino in the summer between his ninth and 10th seasons as head coach at Louisville.

In a news conference this week, Pitino vowed to "re-brand" U of L basketball and promised an offensive pace in the coming season similar to Loyola Marymount's breakneck style back in the day with Paul Westhead, Hank Gathers and Bo Kimble (unlike LMU, the coach said that U of L would maintain a viable commitment to defense, too).

It called to mind the seemingly annual pre-season proclamations Smith used to make at UK about loosening the offensive reins on his teams. Once the basketball started bouncing, those never seemed to work out.

During Pitino's go-go days at UK, it would have seemed unthinkable that Ricky P. would ever have to make such a pledge.

In his eight seasons as Kentucky coach, Pitino never had a team average fewer than 83.1 points (1996-97). Every other one of his Kentucky squads scored at least 85.7 points a game.

At Louisville, Pitino's highest-scoring team (2002-03) averaged "only" 81.6. His 2005 Final Four team put 80.7 points a game on the board. No other U of L team helmed by Pitino has even averaged 76 points.

Lighting up the scoreboard is not the only way in which Pitino at Louisville has found difficulty matching the track record of Pitino at Kentucky.

After inheriting a UK program crippled by NCAA probation, Pitino went 14-14 in his first year. Over the next seven basketball seasons, he never again had a double-digit loss season.

As all those who grumped about "Ten-Loss Tubby" will recall, Smith had five years with double-digit defeats in his 10 seasons in the Kentucky coaching seat.

In his first nine years at Louisville, Pitino has already had five double-digit loss seasons of his own.

At UK, Pitino took his teams to six Elite Eights, three Final Fours and two national title games.

After winning the national championship in his first year at Kentucky in 1998, Smith saw his two best subsequent teams — 2003 and 2005 — see their seasons end one victory short of the Final Four.

At Louisville, Pitino built a Final Four squad in 2005 but his two best teams since — 2008 and 2009 — both lost in the regional finals.

Overall, Pitino won 81.4 percent of the games he coached at Kentucky. Smith won 76 percent of his games as UK head man. At Louisville, Pitino has been victorious 71.9 percent of the time.

In fairness, the Louisville program that Pitino inherited had gone 62-62 and had two losing years in the four seasons before Ricky P. arrived. The Cardinals have been better under Pitino than they were in the years immediately before he came.

Still, just as during Smith's final years in Lexington the UK program seemed to go flat, there are such signs around the U of L basketball operation.

A season ago, Louisville went 20-13 and failed to win a post-season tournament game.

With the three leading scorers gone from that team and an unheralded recruiting class coming in, it's far from certain that 2010-11 is going to be better.

Pitino announced significant staff changes this week. To his credit, the Louisville coach recognized the need to go outside his "coaching family" and plucked an assistant (Tim Fuller) from the ranks of Nike's youth basketball operation.

The hope is that Fuller has the ties in recruiting circles to help Pitino consistently woo elite talent.

With the bitter loss of Marquis Teague to John Calipari still stinging, it will be fascinating to see if Pitino and Fuller can salvage the 2011 recruiting class into which the Louisville head coach has invested so much of his public relations capital.

Whether Pitino can reverse the sense of a creeping program stagnation — similar to that which undermined Tubby Smith in his latter days at Kentucky — may hang in the balance.