Bobby Knight Quotes

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.

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

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

When my time on earth is done and my activities here are past, I want them to bury me upside down, so my critics can kiss my ass.

If the NBA were on channel 5 and a bunch of frogs making love were on channel 4, I'd watch the frogs, even if they were coming in fuzzy.

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.

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

Everybody wants to be on a championship team, but nobody wants to come to practice.

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

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

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

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

When we're playing a good scoring center, we tell our team that it is not our defensive man's job to stop the center. It's the responsibility of our perimeter people to stop the ball from going inside.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Mental toughness is to physical as four is to one.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Al McGuire talked to me I don't know how many times about dealing with the press: "You've got to be a con man." I tried that for a day or so, but it never really worked for me.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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

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

In my dealings with the press, I was like the guy who goes into the cathouse and the madam gets him prepared and looks at him and says, "Who are you going to satisfy with that?" And he looks back at her and says, "Me." That's kind of my sense of humor at times.

I also believe that when something negative comes out about you in the media, that's only one person's opinion. These guys sometimes believe they've been ordained from on high to give the general opinion of the populace, and that just isn't the case.

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.

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

Everybody hears, but few listen.

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

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.

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

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.