[King Glorious]

Originally Posted by horseofcourse

The lionization of these characters cracks me up. Who cares?? If a kid can handle the abuse go play for him. If a kid can't...go play for someone else. It is all really pretty simple. HE has some tyrannical tendencies but did some good things with basketball teams. I prefer to give the credit of his graduation rate to his kids however...not him. My estimation is that you had to be a pretty think skinned kid/self-confident individual to go play for him and subject yourself to that type of abuse and that was the reason for their success...not coach Knight. If he somehow influenced them positively then great. He was simply another cog in their road to success...not the reason for it. I prefer to give each individual credit for his/her own success...not some deity in a sweater. To me there is something inherently wrong with everyone emphasizing how much his ex-players love him?? Why?? Why do we have to do that? Did Wooden's ex-players like him?? Smith's?? K's?? Driessell's??

He is what he is. And I don't really care. My main beef is what I stated earlier...I credit his kids for their own success...but every time a Knight coached team played...it was always all about him...and not the kids playing for him. And in the end, it's the kids who made him...not the other way around as everyone tells us it has to be that way.

The kids deserve some of the credit of course. Maybe a lot of it. But where Knight differs from a lot of coaches is that he recruits the kind of kids that have a certain character that he looks for rather than just be a basketball player. Take Bobby Cremins for example. This is not a knock against him but a reality. He took in guys like Kenny Anderson and Stephon Marbury with the total expectation and knowledge that they were looking to improve their stock and move on and would likely be moving on early. By contrast, there was Coach K and Baron Davis. Davis was one of, if not the top ranked point guard coming out of his high school class. Coach K didn't even recruit him because he felt that it was Baron's intention to leave early even before getting there and he felt that Baron's character, while not saying it was bad, wasn't the right fit for what Coach K wanted at Duke. That's how Knight was also. If it came down to a bad student or one of questionable character that was a great player and one that was just a good player but was a good person and student, Knight would go for the latter. For that, for not giving up on his principles just for the sake of trying to win more games, I think he does deserve a lot of credit.

I think it's also wrong to criticize him for things that the media does. To say that when his teams played, it was all about him is not something that's entirely his fault. Understand that the media has a lot to do with that. At the same time, when you have a coach that has been at one institution that long and has achieved the amount of success that he has, while players come and go every year, it's not surprising that a lot of the focus would be on him. He's the one constant. It's no different than Bobby Bowden or Joe Paterno or Coach K or Dean Smith or Lute Olsen. It's the same in high school too. Look at Bobby Hurley, Sr. in New Jersey or Morgan Wooten at DeMatha. Eddie Robinson at Grambling. I could go on and on. I hear a lot of people suggest that horse racing should do more to promote the jockeys and the trainers instead of just the horses. The reasoning being that the horses come and go each year but the people are the constants.

In anything that takes teamwork, both parties deserve credit. A jockey can't win races if he never rides good horses. A pitcher can't win any games if his team can't score any runs for him. Tom Brady never had the kind of season he did until he got Randy Moss. So, I agree that the kids had something to do with Knight's success. But I think Knight had more to do with theirs. It's him that set up the system that works and brought in the right guys to form the type of group that could be successful.

I think that the reason we bring up how his ex-players feel about him is to illustrate that what everyone see's on the outside is not anywhere close to what is really going on. Those other coaches you mentioned, guys like Wooden, Smith, and Coach K, they don't have the same reputation as Knight for being an ******* so it's not a surprise to anyone that their former players loved them.