"When I played, if you acted the way some of these guys did, you got shoved in a locker with a forearm up against your neck and told: 'You don't do that. That's not how we do things at Indiana,'" he said. "And that's what we need."
Whatever it was Lamar needed to get back on track, consider it done. Since Knight's postgame dressing-down in late February — after a dispirited loss at home to Stephen F. Austin — the Cardinals have won six straight behind those same seniors and grabbed one of the last rungs of the NCAA tournament ladder. Lamar plays Vermont on Wednesday in Dayton, Ohio, with the winner facing mighty North Carolina in nearby Greensboro three nights later. No matter where this experiment in tough love ends, the younger Knight considers it a success already.
"The thing I learned from my first job is you can't coach scared," Knight said Monday after getting of the plane in Dayton. "What I did at Texas Tech was worry about the consequences — what the media thinks, what the fans say — instead of what's best for your program. And so two weeks ago, we'd just been having this horrible couple of days, I told my assistants before I went into the interview room, 'I'm going to get these guys' attention. I'm going to call them out to the media, really throw them under the bus and see what the response was.'
"I knew they were tough enough to do it," he added, then paused. "And they did."
Few things are more fascinating than watching a son step out of his father's shadow, but for most of his adult life, Pat Knight barely seemed to be trying. He played basketball for Bob at Indiana, and spent only one of his eight seasons as a college assistant with somebody else in charge. He inherited his first head coaching job from his father — at Tech, two-thirds of the way through the 2008 season — and employed the same motion offense and man-to-man defensive principles that Bob Knight pioneered and stubbornly stuck with for decades. The son earned his first ejection as the Red Raiders' boss just three games into the next season, storming back out of the tunnel right after getting tossed to continue the argument.
Soon after, though, reports out of Lubbock painted a different Pat Knight. He was much more subdued than his father had been in his heyday, especially around refs, and willing to experiment with an up-tempo style of play and even the occasional zone defense. But halfway measures produced middling results and he got fired at Tech with a 50-61 record and zero invites to the NCAA tournament. He was hired by Lamar less than a month later, prompting critics of both Knights to suggest the small Southland Conference school was simply looking to cash in on the family name. If so, Knight didn't care.
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