By all means, Ohio State should hire Bob Knight. The football program was humiliated by Maurice Clarett, but the basketball program was only embarrassed by Jim O'Brien. Bring in Knight, and the humiliation will follow.
It always does.
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| Bob Knight's notorious temper makes him a risky hire for any school. (Getty Images) |
But some seeds lead to weeds, and eventually that's what Bob Knight would be to the Ohio State athletic department -- another blight, something to be forcibly removed by a shovel, backhoe or Myles Brand.
Even when he is winning championships, Knight is a weed. He grabs players by the throat or butts them in the head. He has verbal altercations with a student on campus or a publicist at a press conference or the chancellor of Texas Tech at a salad bar.
Knight is what he is, and if Ohio State wants that, then by all means, Ohio State should have it. An Ohio State spokesman said Tuesday the school won't comment on the search until a coach is named. Knight didn't return a message left at his office.
Knight would sell tickets and bring victories to an Ohio State program that has dropped from national relevance since the 1999 Final Four. He would graduate players, and he would not commit the kind of egregious NCAA rules violation, whatever the motivation, that brought down O'Brien -- who admitted giving $6,000 to former OSU recruit Aleksandar Radojevic, who never played for the Buckeyes.
The Buckeyes know all that. But they also should know, in addition to a coach who is at all times one bad mood away from making a national headline, they would be hiring a coach who can no longer recruit, and quite possibly no longer win -- not at the level that would justify his off-court issues.
In terms of experience and success, the only contemporaries in Knight's ballpark are Mike Krzyzewski, Jim Calhoun, Lute Olson and Jim Boeheim, all of whom have won at least one national championship and 650 games. In that group, the only coach incapable of winning top-flight recruits is Knight.
Krzyzewski, Olson and Calhoun bring in top-five recruiting classes whenever they have enough scholarships to give. Boeheim doesn't quite do that, but his recruiting classes are usually among the top 20, and he's always good for a Carmelo Anthony here, a Gerry McNamara there.
Knight? The last great recruit he signed, Jared Jeffries at Indiana in 1999, was a hometown kid from Bloomington, Ind. Give Knight credit for signing him, but give that signature an asterisk, too.
Great basketball players no longer want to play for Knight, despite his coaching resumé and despite a graduation rate that has always been among the best in the country, in any sport.
Because he is Bob Knight, coaching genius, he has found a way around that. At Texas Tech, he has averaged nearly 23 victories in his three seasons, going 68-33 at a program that had gone 47-66 in the four seasons before his arrival. The presence of Andre Emmett, one of the better pure scorers in Big 12 history, helped. The problems at the bottom of the Big 12 helped, too.
There are no more Andre Emmetts coming down the pike. Knight has been reduced to scouring junior colleges for players, taking low-profile high school players when he can (or when he must).
Knight won't willingly violate any NCAA rules, and that's an amazing thing to be able to write with certainty. He also will graduate almost all his players, which is another wonderful (and rare) sentence to write.
But here's the question Ohio State must answer: After firing O'Brien for not following the rules of NCAA governance, why replace him with a coach who doesn't always follow the rules of decent civility?
