Bobby Knight Quotations

The will to succeed is important, but what's more important is the will to prepare.

My dad was a very quiet person, and unbelievably tough. But my grandmother gave me my first look at negative thinking to bring about positive results. When I was just a little guy, anytime I came to my grandmother and said I wish for this or that, Grandma would say, 'If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.'

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?

If I were involved with the NBA, I wouldn't want a 19-year-old or a 20-year-old kid to bring into all the travel and all the problems that exist in the NBA. I would want a much more mature kid. I would want a kid that maybe I've been watching on another team, and now he's 21, 22 years old instead of 18 or 19, and I might trade for that kid.

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.

When my time on earth is gone, and my activities here are passed, I want they bury me upside down, and my critics can kiss my ass!

People change over the years, and that changes situations for good and for bad.

I watched the guy that hits a home run, and he comes across the plate and he points skyward, like thanking for the help from the Almighty to hit the home run. And as he does that, I say to myself, 'God screwed the pitcher.' And I don't know how else you look at it.

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.

When I first started coaching, one of the worst things that I think I heard was 'It will be O.K.' I would wonder, 'How the hell is it going to be O.K.?' The worst word in the English language is 'hope.'

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

You don't play against opponents, you play against the game of basketball.

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.

Mental toughness is to physical as four is to one.

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

All of us learn to write in the second grade. Most of us go on to greater things.

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

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.

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

As his team prepares, a coach's entire being must be concentrated on winning games.

Most people have the will to win, few have the will to prepare to win.

The key is not the will to win... everybody has that. It is the will to prepare to win that is important.

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

I don't have to wait until the next morning to regret something I did that was kinda dumb.

Major League Baseball has the best idea of all. Three years before they'll take a kid out of college, then they have a minor league system that they put the kids in. I'm sure that if the NBA followed the same thing, there would be a lot of kids in a minor league system that still were not good enough to play in the major NBA.

I don't think I have ever been out of control.

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.

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

I enjoyed needling the press. If I didn't enjoy it, I wouldn't have done it. Writers have rarely played, so as a coach, you have antagonistic feelings about some guy writing up the story of the game who's never even attempted to play it.

I'm an unemployed teacher right now and I'm looking for a place to teach.

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.

The red I wear is Indiana's red, not Moscow's red. Indiana was here long before communism.

A quick way for any player to make himself better is to think about what he himself doesn't like to play against

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.

I was worried about losing until I looked down the floor and saw Dale Brown. Then I knew we had a chance.

Victory favors the team making the fewest mistakes.

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.

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'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.

Basketball may have been invented in Massachusetts, but it was made for Indiana.

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.

If I were in charge I'd drug test all you sons of b****es, not just the athletes.

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.

Practice structure determines success.

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 tell you what really fries my ass. When somebody gets on me for the way I look. Fat. Overweight. Well, I may be overweight. But I'm sure not fat. And I guarantee you, I'm a better athlete than any f***g body writing. To this day, they don't want to play tennis with me. The don't want to play me in golf. They don't want to f***g run with me

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

I don't intend to retire.

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.

A primary goal of teaching anything is the advantage that learning gives to people over their competitors who haven't been as well taught.

To me, the most enjoyable part is the practice and preparation

It is better to anticipate than to react.

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.

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.

Competitive drills enhance quickness.

BS is just what it stands for, an MS is More of the Same, and a PhD is Piled Higher and Deeper.

For me to get an award from the press, I know there's been no favoritism.

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.

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.

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.

America has the greatest reputation in the world for helping others whenever and wherever disaster strikes. Now, more than ever,it's important for us to contribute to those who are in need. Your assistance is really beneficial and will be greatly welcomed and appreciated.

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.

Don't fight the rabbits. If you fight the rabbits, the elephants are going to kill you.

I think the ability to motivate might be interpreted as the ability to lead, or to show people their goals or, perhaps more important, what their potential is - as a person as well as a player. You've got to show players that being part of a team will carry over to the experience of becoming part of society.

Good planning avoids the need for fixing up a project that plowed ahead without thought... about potential pitfalls.

If you're not careful, you can get a grossly over-inflated opinion about your popularity.

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

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.

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

The goal is to make practice more difficult, physically/mentally, than anything your players will face during a game.

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

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.

The biggest difficulty in getting to the top of the ladder is getting through the crowd at the bottom.

Good basketball always starts with good defense!

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.

Perform drills that force your players to think

Offense is not equal opportunity

Learn to do things right and then do them right every time.

I, fortunately, have never worried about irritating people.

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.

The single most important aspect of coaching is running effective practices

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.

The structure of your practice is the main reason for your success or lack of success as a coach

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.

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.

Players must be able to carry out simple instructions from the bench to the court. If they can't, then they can't play

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

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

Everyone wants to win, but not everyone is willing to prepare to win.

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.

I sit and wonder why no one uses the shot fake. The shot fake, when used correctly, can eliminate a defender

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.

I hate casual shooting. Every shot is preceded by working to get open and catch and shoot under game like conditions

Everybody hears, but few listen.

Passing is your best weapon against man to man. Dribble penetration is your best weapon against zone.