97 Quotes by Bobby Knight
Bobby Knight, a former American basketball coach, is renowned for his intensity, discipline, and unparalleled success on the court. As the head coach of the Indiana Hoosiers from 1971 to 2000, Knight led the team to three NCAA championships and numerous conference titles. Known for his demanding coaching style and emphasis on fundamentals, Knight instilled a strong work ethic and a commitment to teamwork in his players. His attention to detail and ability to develop strategies to exploit opponents' weaknesses made him a master tactician.
Knight's fiery personality and confrontational approach drew both admiration and criticism, but there is no denying the impact he had on the sport. His coaching philosophy, known as "The Motion Offense" and "The Indiana Defense," influenced generations of coaches and players. Beyond his coaching success, Knight's dedication to academics and his players' personal development garnered respect and admiration. His contributions to college basketball and his lasting impact on the sport make him one of the most influential figures in its history.
Bobby Knight Quotes
Discipline is knowing what to do. Knowing when to do it. Doing it to the best of your abilities. Doing it that way every single time.
The will to succeed is important, but what's more important is the will to prepare. (Meaning)
Most people have the will to win, few have the will to prepare to win.
When my time on earth is done and my activities here are past, I want them to bury me upside down, so my critics can kiss my ass.
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.
It has always been my thought that the most important single ingredient to success in athletics or life is discipline. I have many times felt that this word is the most ill-defined in all of our language. My definition isas follows: 1. Do what has to be done; 2. When it has to be done; 3. As well as it can be done; and 4. Do it it that way all the time.
In order to achieve to achieve positive results, one must work for them, not hope for them
Everybody wants to be on a championship team, but nobody wants to come to practice.
I don't believe in luck, I believe in preparation.
You play ball against yourself; your opponent is your potential.
Don't fight the rabbits. If you fight the rabbits, the elephants are going to kill you.
We should not have to push you to work hard, you should work hard because you want to be a great player.
When we're playing a good scoring center, we tell our team that it is not our defensive man's job to stop the center. It's the responsibility of our perimeter people to stop the ball from going inside.
I've never felt my job was to win basketball games - rather, that the essence of my job as a coach was to do everything I could to give my players the background necessary to succeed in life.
We talk in coaching about "winners" - kids, and I've had a lot of them, who just will not allow themselves or their team to lose. Coaches call that a will to win. I don't. I think that puts the emphasis in the wrong place. Everybody has a will to win. What's far more important is having the will to prepare to win.
Do what needs to be done, when it needs to be done the best way it can be done, and do it that way every time.
A coach should never be afraid to ask questions of anyone he could learn from.
I've always had an a$$-to-the-brain theory. When a player's a$$ gets put on the bench, a message goes straight to the brain saying, Get me off of here.
BS is just what it stands for, an MS is More of the Same, and a PhD is Piled Higher and Deeper.
I think that we as a people are always prone to think about, well, tomorrow will be a better day. Well, why will it be a better day? And I think the more that we believe in doing things better, doing the right thing rather than hoping that that's going to happen, let's make it happen.
Mental toughness is to physical as four is to one.
Offense at Indiana is not equal opportunity. Those players who shoot best are going to shoot most. It is important that every player know his offensive limitations. It is also important that a player know who the best shooter is on the team. When a passer has the option of passing to two players, I expect him to get the ball to the best shooter. I continually stop practice and ask players who the best shooter is and I expect them to know. It is important that you get the ball to your best shooter.
To be as good as it can be, a team has to buy into what you as the coach are doing. They have to feel you're a part of them and they're a part of you.
All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things.
Your biggest opponent isn't the other guy. It's human nature.
Good planning avoids the need for fixing up a project that plowed ahead without thought... about potential pitfalls.
Al McGuire talked to me I don't know how many times about dealing with the press: "You've got to be a con man." I tried that for a day or so, but it never really worked for me.
You don't play against opponents, you play against the game of basketball.
The biggest difficulty in getting to the top of the ladder is getting through the crowd at the bottom.
If my primary purpose here at Indiana is to go out and win ballgames, I can probably do that as well as anybody can. I would just cheat, get some money from a lot of people around Indianapolis who want to run the operation that way, and just go out and get the best basketball players I can. Then we'd beat everybody.
Passing is your best weapon against man to man. Dribble penetration is your best weapon against zone.
As I've said, basketball has been, I think, a real cooperative venture. There have been a lot of people that have been involved in it: coaches, administrators - not recently - fans and nobody, nobody any more so than students over the years.
I think that it's perhaps harder to learn from victory than it is from defeat. I think that we don't want defeat. We don't want defeat in sport. We don't want defeat in life. How are we going to be beaten? All right. We have to deal with those things. What's going to cause us to lose the game, whatever the game might be?
For me to get an award from the press, I know there's been no favoritism.
To me, the most enjoyable part is the practice and preparation
Positive wish: 'The sun will come out tomorrow.' Negative reality: 'Yeah, and it will flash brand-new daylight on the same old mess unless something is done to clean it up.
Failure, to me, is not having the desire to try. Having the desire to try is in it own way success.
What is the best thing you can do in a close game? Drive to the basket and put pressure on the defense! Not jack up jump shots
Everybody hears, but few listen.
Players must be able to carry out simple instructions from the bench to the court. If they can't, then they can't play
All the years I coached, we sent a card to every professor for each kid I had, and I was able to keep track on a daily basis who cut class or who was dropping a grade average. What I did was bring that kid in at 5:00 in the morning, and he would run the stairs from the bottom to the top until I told him to quit.
In my dealings with the press, I was like the guy who goes into the cathouse and the madam gets him prepared and looks at him and says, "Who are you going to satisfy with that?" And he looks back at her and says, "Me." That's kind of my sense of humor at times.
I also believe that when something negative comes out about you in the media, that's only one person's opinion. These guys sometimes believe they've been ordained from on high to give the general opinion of the populace, and that just isn't the case.
You are never going to be driven anywhere worthwhile, but you sure as hell drive yourself to a lot of great places. It is up to you to drive yourself there.
As his team prepares, a coach's entire being must be concentrated on winning games.
Practice structure determines success.
Defense is all about helping. No one can guard a good dribbler, You have to walk kids through how to help and then how to help the helper
Perform drills that force your players to think
Victory favors the team making the fewest mistakes.
A quick way for any player to make himself better is to think about what he himself doesn't like to play against
I've always felt that, you know, the Almighty has a lot of things to do other than help my basketball team.
It is better to anticipate than to react.
Learn to do things right and then do them right every time.
Offense is not equal opportunity
Superiority and success doesn't favor good effort or self-esteem... The mentally precise and physically fit win, while the mediocre and obtuse take solace in hopeful cliches.
Competitive drills enhance quickness.
Everyone wants to win, but not everyone is willing to prepare to win.
A great way to test the conditioning of your team is the two-mile run.
Son, my name isn't Knight to you, it's coach Knight or it's Mr. Knight. I don't call people by their last name and neither should you.
As coaches we talk about two things: offense and defense. There is a third phase we neglect, which is more important. It's conversion from offense to defense and defense to offense.
If you're not careful, you can get a grossly over-inflated opinion about your popularity.
The goal is to make practice more difficult, physically/mentally, than anything your players will face during a game.
There are times when my passion for basketball led me into confrontations that I could have handled a lot better. I've always been too confrontational, especially when I know I'm right.
I'd probably be better off without trying to satisfy me, with my sense of humor. There are things that I have said that are funny to me, but they weren't to somebody in the press. So that hasn't worked to my benefit.
You can't imagine the number of people in professional sports who have come up to me and said, "God, you treat those assholes like I'd like to treat them." And my question is, "Then why don't you?".
Good basketball always starts with good defense!
From the time I started teaching, when I was 21, I've always signed my name Bob Knight. My college coach called me Bobby, still does. But I have never introduced myself to anybody in my adult life in any way other than, "I'm Bob Knight."
People change over the years, and that changes situations, for good and for bad.
Walking has been ridiculous in college basketball the past 15 years.
This is like the town council just hired a new marshal to clean up the town, I guarantee you, if I stay here long enough, they'll get rid of me, too.
Pat has been instrumental in what we've done here so far and the most selfish thing for me is that I want to see what we've done placed in the hands of the most competent person, and that's Pat. No one would come close to being able to continue to build on what we've done here so far like he will.
The single most important aspect of coaching is running effective practices
My practices were not set up to be easy or enjoyed.
I, fortunately, have never worried about irritating people.
A primary goal of teaching anything is the advantage that learning gives to people over their competitors who haven't been as well taught.
I'm not sure that an athlete is prepared to be a role model. He has a lot of attention paid to him that he shouldn't have, and then the athletes tend to think of themselves as better than they are.
During my 40-year coaching career at West Point, Indiana and Texas Tech, my teams reached the Final Four on five occasions, winning the national championship three times.
Basketball is a full court game, so every drill must be done full court.
I've never predicted anything. All I have ever said is, that we will do the very best we can.
Well, I think it's pretty much established that I just didn't have any interest in coaching in the pros.
The structure of your practice is the main reason for your success or lack of success as a coach
People want national championship banners. People want to talk about Indiana being competitive. How do we get there? We don't get there with milk and cookies.
I don't think I have ever been out of control.
So when I hear a guy after a game-winning home run say or gesture that God was on his side, I think to myself, 'He's saying God screwed the pitcher.
If universities want to save a little money, they ought to make some cutbacks in administration and in faculty people who teach one class a week.
I was worried about losing until I looked down the floor and saw Dale Brown. Then I knew we had a chance.
My overall point is that 'one and dones' are not healthy for college basketball. I should not have made it personal to Kentucky and its players and I apologize.
You remember when you were a kid growing up, and believed in Santa Claus? There's not much difference between Santa Claus and me today, you know. We're two overweight lovable guys that kids really enjoy.
The thing that bothers me the most about the media is simple accuracy.
We just got our ass beat by a much better team. It happens once in a while. Does every team win every game?
At one point, I said to the officials that you guys haven't called walking for 20 years, now you don't know what it is. When you call walking, you're about half right.
Basketball may have been invented in Massachusetts, but it was made for Indiana.
Why talk now when so many things have been said without ever giving me a chance to talk?
I'm not sure sports writing is an art.
We've gotten into this situation where integrity is really lacking and that's why I'm glad I'm not coaching. You see we've got a coach at Kentucky who put two schools on probation and he's still coaching. I really don't understand that.
There are as many guys in coaching who do a lousy job as there are in the media. Those are two professions that are a lot alike. There aren't a hell of a lot of really good coaches or writers.
Writing was far more of an art in the sports world than it is now.
― Bobby Knight Quotes
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Tal Gur is an author, founder, and impact-driven entrepreneur at heart. After trading his daily grind for a life of his own daring design, he spent a decade pursuing 100 major life goals around the globe. His journey and most recent book, The Art of Fully Living, has led him to found Elevate Society.
