What About Bob Knight?

Among the stories-of-the-moment in college basketball—the watered-down mid-majors, the fall of the Big East, the overabundance of star freshmen—Texas Tech coach Bobby Knight is little more than an afterthought.

Sure he’s won more games than anyone else in the history of the game—but as soon as he broke the record, the country stopped paying attention. Had he won his 880th game at Indiana, we may have taken a little more time to honor arguably the greatest coach to ever bark orders in front of the scorer’s table.

But Bob Knight doesn’t coach the Hoosiers any more. He’s down in Lubbock, Texas, trying his best to get back to the tournament he once dominated.

Texas Tech basketball doesn’t garner a fraction of the attention that Indiana hoops do. There are no candy-striped warmup pants and time-tested traditions; no championship expectations from deep-pocketed boosters; no blue-chip recruits lining up for scholarship offers; and certainly no movies named after the school’s mascot starring Gene Hackman.

At Texas Tech there is Bob Knight—and not much more.

And that's precisely why coach Knight deserves to be recognized for the job he's doing with the Red Raiders.

There’s no questioning Knight’s body of work (three national championships and an Olympic gold medal), but we live in a “what-have-you-done-for-me-lately?” society. Truth be told, it’s been awhile since coach Knight has done anything of significance—unless you consider his constant theatrics and opprobrious penchant for groping his players around the neck "significant."

But forget for one second the yelling, the chair throwing, the choking incidents, and the whip. Forget the contentious press conferences and the plaid sports blazers. Forget the inglorious dismissal from Indiana and the subsequent war of words in the media...and focus, for one moment, on the current Red Raiders team.

At 15-7, and having lost two straight games, Tech isn't a frontrunner for the national championship, or even a likely candidate to crack the Top 25. But look closer and you’ll find a squad with a dearth of top-line talent that has recently beaten then #5 Kansas and #6 Texas A&M back-to-back. Tech has won road games against Arkansas and an underrated Kansas State team, and they are 4-2 in the Big 12—arguably the toughest conference in the country. They've accomplished all that with only one big-name player (Jarrius Jackson) and a host of kids who will never sniff the NBA.

So how are they doing it?

With sound fundamentals—the staple of any Knight-coached team.

Knight has instilled in his group of upperclassmen the sort of discipline and skills with which talent-starved teams upset powerhouse programs. Tech runs his motion offense to perfection, wearing down opponents by forcing them to chase Red Raiders all over the floor.

“We haven’t seen a motion offense as well organized,” said Texas A&M coach Billy Gillispie after his team’s 70-68 loss to the Raiders. “It is the master offense and the master does a great job of doing it.”

Kansas coach Bill Self also had high praise for Tech’s offense.

“We knew we were going to have to defend the entire shot clock,” he said. “That’s who they are. Their patience was certainly much, much better than our impatience.”

Self added, “We didn’t play our best but I think Texas Tech had a lot to do with that. They executed well for about a 10-minute stretch there in the second half superbly.”

Execution when it counts has been a winning recipe for Knight for the past 40 years. His team may not be as exciting as, say, North Carolina—but you will be hard-pressed to find a more prepared and motivated group of athletes, night-in and night-out, than the one under Coach Knight’s watch.

It is these often-overlooked intangibles that Bob Knight brings to every team he coaches. For that reason, even though you may not like him, he deserves your respect. He's done too much for college basketball to merit anything less.

Before Tech’s most recent game against the Texas Longhorns, Knight presented a plaque to Texas coach Rick Barnes as a token of gratitude for the kind words Barnes expressed after Knight’s 880th win. It was an emotional scene, one Barnes will not soon forget.

“I'm just overwhelmed by it,” he said. “When it comes from a man that is the best coach in what we do, it just means the world to me.”

The best coach in what he does? Yeah, Rick, that sounds about right.