Bobby Knight Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

You play ball against yourself; your opponent is your potential.

I don't believe in luck, I believe in preparation.

The will to win is not nearly as important as the will to prepare to win.Everyone wants to win but not everyone wants to prepare to win. preparing to win is where the determination that you will win, is made. Once the game or test or project is underway, it is too late to prepare to win. The actual game, test or projetc is just the end of a long process of getting ready, in which the outcome was really determined. So if you want to win, you must want to prepare to win. Once you prepare to win, winning is almost anti climatic." - Bobby Knight

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

It is better to anticipate than to react.

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.

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

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.

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.

Victory favors the team making the fewest mistakes.

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.

Good basketball always starts with good defense!

I don't intend to retire.

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!

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.

In order to achieve to achieve positive results, one must work for them, not hope for them

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.

A coach should never be afraid to ask questions of anyone he could learn from.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

We should not have to push you to work hard, you should work hard because you want to be a great player.

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'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.

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.

Most people have the will to win, few have 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

Perform drills that force your players to think

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

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

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?

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.'

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

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.

Your biggest opponent isn't the other guy. It's human nature.

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

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.

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

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

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.

Everybody hears, but few listen.

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.

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

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.