Top 90 Bobby Knight Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The single most important aspect of coaching is running effective practices.”

— Bobby Knight

52. “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.”

— Bobby Knight

53. “I just love the game of basketball so much. The game! I don’t need the 18,000 people screaming and all the peripheral things. To me, the most enjoyable part is the practice and preparation.”

— Bobby Knight

54. “A great way to test the conditioning of your team is the two-mile run.”

— Bobby Knight

55. “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.”

— Bobby Knight

56. “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.”

— Bobby Knight

57. “I would rather be thought of as a teacher than a coach.”

— Bobby Knight

58. “If you’re not careful, you can get a grossly over-inflated opinion about your popularity.”

— Bobby Knight

59. “I, fortunately, have never worried about irritating people.”

— Bobby Knight

60. “Basketball is a full court game, so every drill must be done full court.”

— Bobby Knight

61. “I’ve never predicted anything. All I have ever said is, that we will do the very best we can.”

— Bobby Knight

62. “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.”

— Bobby Knight

63. “The red I wear is Indiana’s red, not Moscow’s red. Indiana was here long before communism.”

— Bobby Knight

64. “I think that to stop an offense, you must go to the heart of that offense. If it is a particular move, a screen, the break, an outstanding scorer, whatever it is that they like to do and rely on, you have to work in your plans on taking that completely or as much as possible away from them.”

— Bobby Knight

65. “I’m an unemployed teacher right now and I’m looking for a place to teach.”

— Bobby Knight

66. “I recognize that I have a problem with my temper. For those times it has ever caused me to do anything that gave anyone understandable and justifiable reason to be upset, I am sincerely sorry.”

— Bobby Knight

67. “My practices were not set up to be easy or enjoyed.”

— Bobby Knight

68. “To me, the most enjoyable part is the practice and preparation.”

— Bobby Knight

69. “Why talk now when so many things have been said without ever giving me a chance to talk?”

— Bobby Knight

70. “I always designed my practice plans the night before and then made tweaks a few hours before practice began.”

— Bobby Knight

71. “For me to get an award from the press, I know there’s been no favoritism.”

— Bobby Knight

72. “Well, I think it’s pretty much established that I just didn’t have any interest in coaching in the pros.”

— Bobby Knight

73. “Competitive drills enhance quickness.”

— Bobby Knight

74. “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.”

— Bobby Knight

75. “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.”

— Bobby Knight

76. “If I came in to recruit your son, I would tell you, your wife, and your son, that I will be the most demanding coach your son can play for.”

— Bobby Knight

77. “We just got our ass beat by a much better team. It happens once in a while. Does every team win every game?”

— Bobby Knight

78. “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.”

— Bobby Knight

79. “I don’t intend to retire.”

— Bobby Knight

80. “I don’t think I have ever been out of control.”

— Bobby Knight

81. “I’ve always felt that, you know, the Almighty has a lot of things to do other than help my basketball team.”

— Bobby Knight

82. “I don’t have to wait until the next morning to regret something I did that was kinda dumb.”

— Bobby Knight

83. “Failure, to me, is not having the desire to try. Having the desire to try is in it own way success.”

— Bobby Knight

84. “Walking has been ridiculous in college basketball the past 15 years.”

— Bobby Knight

85. “And I would be the first to admit that probably, in a lot of press conferences over the time that I have been in coaching, indulging my own sense of humor at press conferences has not been greatly to my benefit.”

— Bobby Knight

86. “As his team prepares, a coach’s entire being must be concentrated on winning games.”

— Bobby Knight

87. “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.”

— Bobby Knight

88. “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.”

— Bobby Knight

89. “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.”

— Bobby Knight

90. “I have always maintained that in basketball the importance of the mental to the physical is about four to one.”

— Bobby Knight