Dino Gaudio tells his side

Thanks to court filings entered Wednesday in his federal extortion case, we’re finally getting to hear Dino Gaudio’s side of the story from his unamiable breakup with Chris Mack and Louisville basketball last spring.

The most interesting claims in the filing as far as Cardinal fans are concerned are:

1) Chris Mack was the one who tapes the infamous conversation between the two.

2) Gaudio claims that Mack told him he would Gaudio’s severance package “either through the University of Louisville or personally.”

“I’m not trying to f... your family and your money,” Mack told Gaudio. “I love you.”

3) Gaudio received a number of letters of support from various figures in college basketball, including Fran McCaffery, Quinn Slazinski’s father, and ... John Calipari.

4) Gadio tells a story about Mack organizing a coaches meeting after Louisville was left out of the NCAA tournament in which an irate Mack began blaming his players and threatening to pull scholarships. Gaudio says that he and Mack differed greatly in their opinions on how to deal with Covid, and implies that had Mack taken proper precautions, the team would have been safely in the field of 68.

5) The filing once again identifies the minor violations — graduate assistants participating in practice and recruiting videos using ESPN’s 30 for 30 imaging — that Gaudio threatened to expose after he was fired. The filings claim that Gaudio had shared his issues with the violations with Mack when they were transpiring.

Considering that Gaudio has already pleaded guilty and been set for sentencing on Aug. 27, it was a bit surprising to see a filing like this out of the blue on Wednesday. Perhaps his attorneys thought these anecdotes would help make what was already likely to be a light sentence even lighter. Or perhaps Gaudio simply wanted some of the negative attention that has been cast on him to be cast in a different direction.

All we know is that the fun is apparently never going to stop rolling on around here.