Bob Knight on Notre Dame: 'Some dumb Catholic boys up there'
At this point, it's a neck-and-neck race between Bob Knight's win total and the number of controversial/noteworthy comments he's made.
Knight didn't hold back at yet another public speaking engagement, as Thursday night he told a room full of donators at the Big Brothers Big Sisters of Central Indiana fundraiser his thoughts about coaching, the NCAA's negligence of student athletes, and just how stubborn (irony, hello!) Notre Dame is.
This is clearly what the people of central Indiana paid for.
As for Notre Dame, Knight said the Irish, an independent in football and Big East member in other sports, should join the Big Ten. He referred to a couple of players from the gold-medal winning 1984 Olympic team: Sam Perkins of North Carolina and Chris Mullin of St. John's.
"They were two smart Catholic boys," Knight said. "They should advise Notre Dame to go in the Big Ten, because there are some dumb Catholic boys up there. They have no idea how much it would change their recruiting."
Knight slammed the NCAA for not having student-athletes' interest at heart by having such loopholes as one-and-done guys, who can skip second-semester classes but still help a team win a title before bolting for the NBA. The culture of the sport is severely tainted, he essentially argued.
Jeff Rabjohns, who wrote the piece for the Indianapolis Star, got NCAA spokesman Erik Christianson to clarify some of Knight's arguments, bringing up the fact Academic Progress Rates can punish schools down the line by way of a loss of scholarships and bans on postseason play.
And one more fitting quote from the 69-year-old ex-coach.
"I wanted them to be able to do unreasonable things because that was going to help us win and that was going to help them become people who could live good lives."
I'm not sure you could find three quotes that more sufficiently sum up what Bob Knight was about as a coach than that one.
