In 1990-91, the team suffered a losing season, at 14-16. In 1997, its record collapsed to 12-20, the worst in the proud program’s history at the time.
The Courier Journal then reported that over nine seasons, only six of Crum’s 37 scholarship players (16%) graduated in the time period expected by the NCAA.
First, in 1996, the NCAA placed Louisville on probation for two years after the newspaper reported star center Samaki Walker was driving around town in vehicles owned by a booster.
Three years later, the NCAA imposed a postseason ban on the Cardinals after paying for a hotel room for a player’s father. The ban was miraculously reversed on a technicality when Louisville’s lawyer showed the school hadn't received adequate notice that it could be charged as a repeat offender.
Still, Crum’s reputation was tarnished, and his team wasn’t winning as it once did.
Experts offered a variety of explanations.
Olsen said the decline began with the rise of AAU basketball, especially in the South, which brought more attention to players and made it harder to slip and steal high school stars like Lancaster Gordon and Charles Jones, both of Mississippi.
Then, in 1989, Tennessee lured away Crum’s top assistant and recruiter, Wade Houston and along with him, his son, Ballard High School phenom Allan Houston, who went on to become the Volunteers' all-time leading scorer and later a star in the NBA.
With the rise of the Big East Conference, founded in 1979, Crum lost his ability to pick off future stars like the McCray brothers, of Mount Vernon, New York.
"We used to make a living with kids that we thought were good athletes, mostly in the South, where football was dominant,” Crum said in a 1998 interview. “But today, with all the camps and all the services that write about all the players, it's hard to find sleepers.”
Critics blamed Crum himself for some of the declines.
They said he was slow to embrace the 3-point shot, adopted by the NCAA the season after the Cards won the 1986 title.
He also began to lose top local recruits like Doss High School’s Derek Anderson, who went to Ohio State before transferring to Kentucky.
Recruiting analysts also told The Courier Journal that Crum was no longer as visible as other coaches at camps and high-profile all-star games.
Halfway through what turned out to be his final season, athletic director Tom Jurich declined to give Crum a vote of confidence and months of sniping between them ensued. Finally, on March 2, 2001, his 64th birthday, with one game left in a 12-19 season, Crum announced he was retiring.
He denied he’d been forced to leave. "I'm going because I want to," he said at a news conference.
Softening the blow, the university agreed to pay him about $7 million, including $338,000 a year for 15 years as an assistant for development, plus $2 million under the termination clause in his contract.
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Writing on ESPN.com, Bilas lamented that Crum “could not exit gracefully in a storybook ending.”
Bozich wrote that Crum’s career at U of L started so hot that decline was inevitable. “Crum could not compete with Crum."
Still, even in the 1990s, Crum took the Cards to the NCAA Tournament eight times and had four 20-win seasons.
Denny Crum's career wins as Louisville coach
He finished his career with 675 wins, which at the time was 14th on the NCAA career list. When he retired, only one Division I coach, Jim Phelan of Mount Saint Mary’s University, had coached longer at a single school.
"He embodied what a coach should be: he cared deeply about his players, he worked tirelessly for his university, he espoused the right values and stuck to them and he lived each and every day for his family," U of L athletic director Josh Heird said in a news release. "Coach gave his heart and soul to this university and this community and he will forever be a part of our past, present and future. Our prayers are with his wife, Susan, and the entire Crum family."
Crum stayed in Louisville, with his wife, Susan Sweeney Crum, the reporter and anchor he’d married in 2001. He was married twice before and had three children — Cynthia and Steve, from his first marriage, and Scott from his second.
Starting in 2004, Crum co-hosted a popular radio show for 10 years with an unlikely partner, his erstwhile adversary, UK coach Joe B. Hall, who died in January of 2022 at the age of 93.
And he continued to lend his name and time to charitable causes as well as making unannounced visits to Card fans in hospitals and nursing homes, for which he never sought publicity.
“He made a lot of people happy,” Olsen said. “He did it because it was the right thing to do.”
Despite two strokes in his later years, the second in 2019, Crum continued to be present. He was there when one of his former players from the 1986 championship team, Kenny Payne, arrived in Louisville to take over the program in April, 2022.
Crum was honored with a new Hometown Heroes banner in March on the Whiskey Row Lofts building. Crum had a banner before, but it had been taken down due to construction.
In 2007, the floor at Freedom Hall was named Denny Crum Court in his honor. In September, Crum attended the dedication of Denny Crum Hall. Heird called the $23.5 million facility "first in class," and Payne said the project "represents Denny Crum excellently."
The building, across Floyd Street from the Planet Fitness Kueber Center, the U of L basketball practice facility, is home to the men's and women's basketball teams, along with other students.
Crum sat for photos with attendees at the dedication. Payne said Crum "changed my life" and said that he talked sometimes to the current Cardinals about Crum's place in program history.
“I'm a believer in, I want them to ask questions,” Payne said. "But there will be days when I talk about the years that I was here, the years before me, the years after me and what (Crum) established, which is the foundation and the tradition of Louisville basketball.”
In October, Crum attended Louisville Live, the Cardinals' celebratory tip-off to the season.
Fans adored him and would burst into ovations when he appeared on the big screen during games at the KFC Yum! Center, where the Cards moved in 2010.
Al Maguire once said Crum was underrated because he didn’t seek attention for himself. Billy Reed said he would have garnered more fame if he weren’t so “depressingly normal.”
But Crum made Louisville a destination job for head coaches and showed the Cards could compete for national championships.
“When he has at his best, nobody was better,” Bilas wrote when Crum retired. “And he was at his best for a long, long time.”
