Bob Knight Retires

Just as I am having an emotional high from the Super Bowl, I hear on XL 950 Radio that Bobby Knight has stepped down as the coach of Texas Tech. His son, Pat will step in and take over. I have seen about three Texas Tech games this year. All of them on CW4 locally. I do appreciate them putting on some games. They have been showing a lot of Big East games the past weekends. I am thankful for that because I don't have cable/satellite TV, which inevitably means no Big Ten network or ESPN. So I do have withdrawals occasionally, but I do know that I need to treasure the games that I do get to see. Anyhow, I am really surprised about the decision because it's a mid-season decision in the middle of the conference schedule. While I was watching the TT games earlier this year all I saw was Coach Knight sitting down an awful lot and Pat being in his ear the entire game. So based on that right there, I am not surprised, I just didn't expect it at this time in the season.
For all the negative things that Coach Knight gets publicized for (I just did a Google image search for Bob Knight and the 4th pic was the chair toss, and the fifth was the choke), there is no one that can deny the impact that Knight had on the game of basketball. His motion offense is second to none. His players always understood the game. His man defense was always stifling. Another thing that always stood out to me was the fact that the ones who graduated from IU and went on to play in the NBA never had amazing stand out careers. I know Allen Henderson has been around forever and Calbert Cheaney bounced around for a while, but really Isiah Thomas is really the only one who was head and shoulders a real good NBA player. To me this stood out that his players knew how to "play" basketball the way that it was supposed to play. I am not knocking the NBA but the NBA is a different brand of basketball and typically lends itself to athleticism and finding matchup problems. Players who played for Knight understood how to be successful at life. He might have gone about it a different way than I would like, but his players knew what it took to be successful. His players had respect for him, their opponents, and the game itself. Today the winningest coach in history has stepped down and the coaching world has lost one of the game's biggest influences.