Texas Tech basketball docs we need: Bob Knight at the salad bar

The tension had been building since the moment Knight arrived

In the four years before Knight was hired, Tech managed to go just 47-66 with four-straight losing seasons.  What’s more, in each of those four years, the Red Raiders managed to win no more than 13 games in a season, and in the final three years, the total declined from the year prior.

So having a coach with the skins on the wall that Knight had was seen as a godsend by much of the fan base.  But there was a vocal minority which was adamantly opposed to the hiring.  In fact, the charge was led by a group of Texas Tech faculty members.

As Knight was interviewing for the job, the Faculty Senate delivered a petition opposing the move, which was signed by 53 faculty members, to the office of President David Schmidly.

"Penned by Walter Schaller, a philosophy professor and vice president of the Faculty Senate, the petition, said: ”Having Mr. Knight as the basketball coach at Texas Tech would bring much negative publicity and damage our reputation in ways that are completely unnecessary. At a minimum, the announcement of his hiring would be accompanied by the film clip in which he throws a chair across the basketball court, except this time the name of Texas Tech would be attached to such antics.”"

Of course, AD Gerald Myers went ahead with the hiring of his long-time friend.  And of course, Knight was a lightning rod almost immediately.  In December of 2001, hardly a month into his first season with Tech, Knight and the general manager of the Compaq Center in Houston had an argument after Knight told the media that Tech’s lockerroom “would have been very, very cramped with four midgets”.

Two years later, Knight hurled numerous profanities at a reporter during an ESPN interview when he was asked about his relationship with his former player Steve Alford, who was then the head coach of Iowa and who was sitting right next to Knight during the incident, which occurred prior to Texas Tech and Iowa meeting in Dallas.

Needless to say, those incidents, and who knows how many others that didn’t make it into the public purview, did little to help assuage the concerns of the members of the Texas Tech faculty and administration who were already anti-Knight.  Thus, one has to wonder just how defensive Knight was during his time in Lubbock given how under the microscope he had been for the past decade as his missteps caused him to garner the type of attention that no coach wants.  And in 2004, everything boiled to the surface in a story that only furthered the infamy of the legendary head coach.