UGA players excited about Knight

University of Georgia basketball players were excited to hear that Bob Knight is interested in being their coach.

“I’d like to play for Coach Knight — as long as he doesn’t hit me,” freshman forward Trey Thompkins said.

Thompkins added that he was “just kidding” about the hitting part, a reference to Knight’s famously fiery temper.

Seriously, said Thompkins, he’d be thrilled if Knight, the all-time winningest NCAA Division I men’s basketball coach, comes to Athens.

“Coach Knight is a legend,” Thompkins said. “I’d love to have him coach here, and I feel like he’d make me even better than I am now.

“That would honestly be a tremendous thing to me. I’d be really happy.”

Thompkins commented after being informed of the report by Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Furman Bisher that Knight, according to a mutual friend of Knight and Bisher, would accept the Georgia job if offered. The job came open with Thursday’s firing of Dennis Felton.

Another Georgia player, junior forward-center Albert Jackson, was also enthusiastic that Knight might be interested in the position.

“I would love to have a coach of that caliber, that stature,” Jackson said. “You have a Hall of Fame coach, you have somebody like that, all you can do is be happy.

“If Bobby Knight wants to come in here, I’d be more than happy.”

Jackson added that he’s sure Damon Evans, Georgia’s athletics director, and Arthur Johnson, the associate athletics director who is the department’s administrator for men’s basketball, “will get the right guy.”

UGA President Michael Adams declined to comment on Knight, but said Georgia is “looking right now at everybody in the country who might be available” and is committed to spending what is required to hire a “proven entity” who has had success leading a major program.

Adams said he’ll “stay out of it” until the field is narrowed to two or three finalists.

Adams, who sat with two UGA vice presidents in the first row behind the Georgia bench as the team lost its eighth consecutive game Saturday at Alabama, praised the “very mature way” in which the players have handled the Felton firing.

Guard Corey Butler won’t play for the next coach, whoever that is, because this is the final season for the senior microbiology major. But Butler, like his teammates, was fascinated by mention of Knight.

“That’d be big time for the program, just knowing he’s the legendary Bobby Knight,” Butler said. “That would be big for bringing in fans and getting the job done.”

Asked if a younger coach might be a better long-term answer than the 68-year-old Knight, Butler shrugged.

“To be honest, I don’t know that much about college basketball,” he said. “I just play it.”