This blog has moved! Yes, already!
As of Thursday, Feb. 12, this little blog has relocated to a new home on AJC.com. It’s the same newspaper, the same Web site and the same writer (feel free to groan) — there’s just a new URL.
New features: Bigger type, more graphics, comments that load 10 times faster and a larger and more recent photo that makes me look pretty doggone old. I think you’ll like it (the blog, not the photo). But I am, as we know too well, often wrong.
Home > Mark Bradley > Archives > 2009 > February > 02
Monday, February 2, 2009
UGA would be foolish to hire Knight
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Bobby Knight has won more games than any men’s Division I coach ever, but the unfortunate reality is that he has done it while acting like a little boy. That’s why, to me, he’ll always be “Bobby” Knight, not the more grown-up “Bob” he prefers. At 68, he’s still a brat.
We see it again now. Knight has let it be known he wants to coach Georgia, but according to Furman Bisher’s “mutual friend,” “he doesn’t want it to look like he’s pursuing the job.” Sad to say, that remains the Knight way.
He considers himself above the process, above the sport itself. He’s in it for Knight and his legacy. He would use Georgia the way he used Texas Tech — to win a few more games and draw a hundred more huzzahs from his amen corner on ESPN, and then he’d wake up on the wrong side of the bed and decide he’d rather go off and kill some animals.
The folks at Texas Tech looked the other way when Knight upbraided a university chancellor in a grocery store and when he chucked a player under the chin. For their forbearance, here’s what they got — three NCAA tournament victories in 6 1/2 years, a Big 12 record of 53-49 and Knight’s overmatched offspring as head coach. It was almost exactly a year ago that Knight, pleading fatigue, quit on his team. Today the Red Raiders are 11-10 and Pat Knight was just ejected from a game for charging onto the court (twice!).
And Bobby Knight, presumably refreshed, is ready to come coach Georgia.
And here’s what Georgia should say to the General: “No, sir!”
The Bulldogs have already paid the price for recycling one famous coach with a pockmarked history. Knight wouldn’t bring the same sort of dishonor to Athens that Jim Harrick did — Knight has no history of NCAA violations — but he would embarrass the school all the same. He can’t help himself. He’s Bobby Knight, who has never admitted he was wrong despite a lifetime of opportunities.
There was a time when he won big enough to override the inevitable “incidents,” but that time was a quarter-century ago. Seventeen different men have won NCAA titles since Knight took his final one, and 36 different men have taken teams to the Final Four since last Knight made it. It isn’t that his motion offense has ceased to work; it’s that he cannot find and keep good enough players to make it work well. (At Texas Tech, he was 9-28 against Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas.)
Dennis Felton failed largely because he couldn’t sign enough of the players developed in Georgia. Question: Who was the last truly gifted player to labor under Knight? Calbert Cheaney, who was a senior in 1993?
Put simply, no latter-day big-timer will put up with the abuse Knight puts out. After the late Jason Collier transferred from Indiana to Georgia Tech, I asked what kind of guy it took to coexist with Knight.
Said Collier: “There isn’t one.”
As strange as it sounds, the school that has won one NCAA game in the past 12 seasons — and then had to forfeit — can do better than the man who has won three national titles. Sure, he’d draw the knee-jerk raves from Digger and Dickie V. and Fran Fraschilla, but he wouldn’t be able to recruit against Billy Donovan and Bruce Pearl and Billy Gillispie. He’d win some games and maybe eke out an NCAA bid, but then, a couple of years down the line, he’d again decide he’d “had enough.” And he’d leave Georgia high and dry.
Because he’s Bobby Knight and he does whatever he pleases. He’s the disciplinarian who, in 68 years, has never managed to discipline himself. He’s not quite the last guy Georgia needs — that’d be Jim Harrick Jr. — but he’s in the bottom five.
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Bradley’s Buzz: UGA, Tech and recruiting rankings
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Again we ask: Do rankings matter?
We at the AJC and AJC.com have mapped our comprehensive plan for Signing Day — me, I’ve been dispatched to Athens — and we hope you nice folks will give us a click or two come Wednesday. But here, leaving myself open to allegations of heresy, I ask: How much can one tell from one day in February?
I ask because, yet again, Georgia is lighting up the recruiting rankings. Rivals.com has the Bulldogs’ list of commitments rated No. 9 nationally, and Scout.com has Georgia rated No. 7. Georgia Tech, meanwhile, stands 49th according to Rivals and 26th according to Scout.
Rivals has ranked Georgia in its top 10 every year since 2002, and only once (in 2007) has Tech cracked its top 25. Scout has had Georgia in its top 10 every season save one since 2004, and over that span it placed Tech ahead of Georgia only in 2007. And yet Tech, at last check, beat Georgia 45-42 on Nov. 29.
If you were a signee in 2004, you’d have been a redshirt senior in 2008. If recruiting is all-important and Georgia had outrecruited Tech four of those five years — five of five, according to Rivals — how did the Jackets manage to stay on the same field with the Bulldogs in any of those seasons, let alone actually win a game?
I know what Tech fans will say — coaching. And maybe Georgia fans will, too.
Was Felton’s firing “repulsive”?
That’s the word Mike DeCourcy used in Sporting News Today — repeatedly, as you’ll see here. But DeCourcy doesn’t argue that Dennis Felton shouldn’t have been fired as Georgia’s basketball coach, just that he shouldn’t have fired been in midseason.
Me, I hate this kind of hair-splitting. If you know you’re going to fire a guy, fire the guy. And if anyone is looking for a reason why Felton should have been fired, read the next item.
From Norcross High to the NBA
The fine folks at nbadraft.net list two Norcross products — Gani Lawal, who’s at Tech, and Al-Farouq Aminu, who’s at Wake Forest — as lottery picks in their 2009 mock draft. They list another Norcross alum — Jodie Meeks, who’s at Kentucky — as the 41st pick in their 2010 mock. If you’re keeping score, that marks three pro-type talents who played high school ball 57.2 miles from Athens (according to Google Maps), and the Bulldogs whiffed on all three.
Speaking of SEC basketball …
After South Carolina won in Rupp Arena for only the second time in history, Andy Katz of ESPN.com pronounced the Gamecocks a legitimate SEC threat. South Carolina is working under a first-year coach (Darrin Horn) and is based in a state that doesn’t yield half the talent Georgia does. In a conference so clearly unsettled, why couldn’t Georgia have done something similar? I ask you, why?
Worrisome signs for your Atlanta Hawks
They’re still ahead of Miami and Philadelphia in the standings, but the Hawks’ ongoing slide — they’ve lost nine of 14 — has put their status as fourth-best-in-the-East in peril. John Hollinger of ESPN.com has moved the Sixers ahead of the Hawks in his latest power ratings, and colleague Marc Stein has moved the Heat ahead of Atlanta in his.
Then again, maybe we shouldn’t be all that surprised — or alarmed — that the Hawks have sagged. Art Garcia of NBA.com still regards them as the league’s biggest first-half surprise.
Hot stove, back burner
According to Jerry Crasnick of ESPN.com, the Phillies have expressed an interest in lefty reliever Will Ohman, whom the Braves want very much to re-sign. I’d link to the actual story Cras — he’s a friend — wrote, but it’s another of those Worldwide Leader Insiders-only things that drive me crazy. So I’ve linked to Phillies Nation, which reports his original report, instead. How’s that for a workaround?
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