Explore Quotes by Bobby Knight

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

To be as good as it can be, a team has to buy into what you as the coach are doing. They have to feel you're a part of them and they're a part of you.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

Everybody hears, but few listen.

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

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