Reports surface about Knight's possible coaching comeback

ESPN commentator Dick Vitale said Monday he believes former IU men’s basketball coach Bob Knight is interested in coaching at Georgia, while former Hoosier basketball coach Dan Dakich said Knight would be good for any program.

No one at Georgia is saying if the school has interest in Knight. But after Georgia fired head coach Dennis Felton on Thursday and named assistant coach Pete
Herrmann the interim coach for the remainder of the season, rumors began to surface that Knight could make a comeback.

Vitale said Georgia should make Knight, his longtime friend, an offer “in a heartbeat.”

“I don’t even know if he would take a job, but I know Georgia has a lot of positives going for it in the scenario there and I think he’d be interested, I really do; but I can’t speak for Bob Knight,” Vitale, who works with Knight as an television basketball analyst, said in a telephone interview to The Associated Press.

“To me it’s no contest, if Bobby Knight is interested in Georgia basketball, it’s no contest,” Vitale said. “He’s so good I’d come with him as an assistant. I’d be his chauffeur.”

Knight won 661 games in 29 years at IU, including 21 20-plus win seasons, 11 Big Ten Championships and three national championships. Also while with the University, Knight led the 1984 U.S. basketball team to a gold medal in the Olympics.

A former player and assistant coach under Knight, Dakich said he wishes his old coach would return to the hardcourt, though he did not comment on Georgia’s situation.

“I hope he does,” Dakich told the Indiana Daily Student on Monday night in a telephone interview. “I think it’d be good for basketball. I think it’d be good for whoever he gets to coach.”

Dakich said he has not contacted Knight since reports of him being interested in Georgia surfaced recently, but said he thinks Knight would be great for any program.

“He’s won wherever he’s been,” he said. “I think he’d bring good people into the mix, whether it was his coaches or his players.”

Dakich, who now hosts a sports talk radio show in Indianapolis, went on to say he believes Knight would not go to a school where basketball isn’t important.

“He’s not going to go to a place where he can’t win and he can’t have interest,” he said. “I think that was part of him leaving Texas Tech. He was kind of tired of being at a place where there’s no interest.”

Knight, the all-time winningest men’s major college coach with 902 victories, began working as a studio analyst with ESPN after he resigned as Texas Tech’s coach on Feb. 4, 2008. He has expanded his duties with ESPN this season.

In a comment on ESPN on Monday, Knight said, “I have never said that I wouldn’t coach again. I’ve simply said in the past, if the right situation came along, I would be interested.”

Vitale said Georgia could be the right situation. He said the job would “excite” Knight, if he were offered it.

“If you want to win, you want to graduate players, you want to stay within the NCAA rules, you want integrity, you want your players to get degrees, he fills all those areas,” Vitale said. “Plus he brings instant, incredible credibility, notoriety, publicity to your program, and knowing Bob as well as I do, he has at least 10 years left in him. This guy is in incredible shape and he loves to teach the game.”

Georgia Athletics Director Damon Evans, returning from the Super Bowl on Monday, could not be reached for immediate comment. Evans said Thursday he would use a search firm to help assemble a pool of candidates.

Georgia President Michael Adams had no comment on Knight. Adams is leaving Evans in charge of the search “until they get to the finalists,” said Tom Jackson, the university vice president for public affairs.

-The Associated Press contributed reporting from Atlanta.