1.01.2007

Texas Tech starts the New Year right

In honor of Coach Knight becoming the winningest coach in Division I history with Texas Tech's win over New Mexico today ... the Top 10 reasons to love Bob Knight:

10. The tradition of basketball that he built at IU. (Hopefully now it begins to regenerate.)

9. No matter how you interpret his comments, you always know exactly where he's coming from.

8. His quote about Mike Davis from a couple of years ago: "The guy that's coaching there is a guy that I told Pat we were going to replace at the end of the season. There's no way that I would have kept the guy any longer than that."

7. He never cheats to get players ... and can still get wins because of the way he's able to motivate the guys he can get.

6. He cares about his players graduating.

5. He surprisingly supplied me with his own dose of reality TV in 2006.

4. He coached the last team to have an undefeated season ... in 1976.

3. The always-memorable press conferences.

2. Watching him choke back tears today while listening to Frank Sinatra's "My Way" being played over the loud speakers in Lubbock, Texas.

1. He shares my feelings on professional basketball and can articulate it like no one else: "If the NBA were on Channel 5, and a bunch of frogs making love were on Channel 4, I'd watch the frogs, even if they were coming in fuzzy."

I still wish it could have been at Indiana, and I still remember the feeling I had working at the Daily News that black, Sunday night in 2000 when the reports were coming in that he had been fired. You sure wouldn't have had to sell tickets at $8.80 to pack Assembly Hall, but it is what it is. Congrats to Bob.

Finally, some Indiana basketball nostalgia:

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