Bob Knight leads all Division I men's basketball coaches with 902 victories. He has coached in five Final Fours and won three national championships at Indiana, appearing in 25 NCAA tournaments in his 29-year coaching career.
So when I am looking for an expert analysis of Monday's national title game between Butler and Connecticut, I call on my very close personal friend, and as usual, he gives a common-sense conclusion better than anyone else I know.
"I think that each team has a great story to it," Knight, now working as an analyst for ESPN, said Sunday.
"First of all, Butler getting back to the NCAA finals, and going to the final game is a remarkable coaching job and a remarkable playing job. I saw Butler play early in the year against Xavier and they looked like they were the furthest thing away from a team that would have a chance to win the NCAA tournament."
Butler lost at Xavier 51-49 to fall to 4-4 on the season. The Bulldogs were 14-9 after losing at Youngstown State on Feb. 3, but they haven't lost since, winning 14 games in a row. In doing so, they became the first team from the state of Indiana to make back-to-back Final Fours, a feat never achieved by Indiana, Purdue or Notre Dame.
"They worked over the course of the year," Knight said. "I think at one point they were 6-5 in the Horizon League [after losing to Youngstown State], and they've gotten things together and they got better and better and better, to the point now where they're every bit as good as they were a year ago, maybe even better. I think it's probably the best job that players and coaches have done during the course of the season that I may have ever seen."
As for the Huskies, they were unranked at the beginning of the season, then shot up the polls after winning the Maui Invitational in November. They struggled some in Big East play but then won the 16-team conference tournament in New York.
"They've already gone through something every bit as difficult as the NCAA tournament, and that was the Big East tournament," Knight said.