It seems that college basketball begins earlier and earlier each year. For those of us in ACC country, it is still THE season, as the great expansion into football has led only to imperial overstretch. The conference was embarrassed last year as only four teams received NCAA tournament bids – the same number as the Missouri Valley Conference, as I recall. Horrors. This season the ACC’s North Carolina, with an influx of talent to go along with last year’s bumper crop of freshmen (sorry, once a sportswriter, always a sportswriter), is one of the early favorites, along with defending champion Florida and Kansas. Ohio State, Arizona, Georgetown, LSU, Wisconsin and UCLA are other teams to watch. Duke seems a little down. In March, a mid-major like George Mason will surprise us all.

The face of basketball has changed constantly over the past two decades. At first the top college juniors left for the NBA, then sophomores, then freshmen, and finally high schoolers (especially big high schoolers). Play suffered, yet it was always somehow better than the official pros. This is the first year of an experiment to reverse the flow. The NBA now requires players to be at least one year out of high school, or age 20, before entering the league. Some high schoolers simply opted to go to Europe or find other ways to kill time, but a significant number of big men decided to head to campus for the obligatory year in purgatory. The best of them is said to be Ohio State’s Greg Oden, although he is out until January with an injured wrist. We’ll see how it plays out. Maybe some of the one-year wonders will stay.

There is one constant with the beginning of any basketball season. Bob Knight is in trouble. This season was supposed to be a celebration of his coaching career at West Point, Indiana and Texas Tech. (Yes, Ashlanders, I know he played basketball at Ohio State.) He will become the winningest coach of all time in Division I basketball, passing Adolph Rupp (876) and Dean Smith (879). The record seems to mean a good deal to him. He probably won’t keep it – Coach K at Duke will get there if he stays in the business and there are other relatively young coaches who will log many wins with the expanded schedules. But Knight clearly relished the recognition that the record would bring him. It has been two decades since he won his third and last national championship. He has had some fine teams since, one of which could have won a championship had Alan Henderson been healthy. But for the most part, if you look at his on-court accomplishments since 1987, they have been good but not great. The sort of record that would keep a coach employed but hardly basking in the national spotlight.

Knight has stayed in the news largely for his non-basketball related behavior. I won’t repeat the litany of thrown chairs, choked players, fans put in trashcans, and obscenity laced press conferences. You can see them all tonight on ESPN’s Sports Center, along with the latest entry in the Bob Knight bill of particulars. Even on his best behavior Knight treats his players, well, loudly and unkindly. Last night Knight became upset with sophomore Michael Prince. As Knight began to berate him, Prince lowered his head. Knight popped him firmly under the chin. Look at me when I talking to you. The cameras of course were rolling, along with calls for Knight’s head to roll. The player and his parents said it was no big deal. (Here’s a newsflash: if you decide to play for Bib Knight, expect a firm touch). Most coaches and former players – but not all – who opined on the subject said, no big deal. But it is a big deal.

Knight is Shakespearean tragedy. By all accounts he runs as clean a program as is possible in big time college athletics. His players graduate. He contributes large sums to university libraries. His former players – those who don’t quit anyway – almost always remain his strongest defenders. That says a lot. (Dean Smith may have put you off with his overly-clever strategies and whining, but his former players, including those like Michael Jordan who have no incentive to suck up, remain close to him. That says a lot.) But then there is the ESPN highlight reel of Knight’s transgressions. And Knight refuses to apologize. He is never wrong. He is of the John Wayne school – real men don’t apologize.

These contradictions are detailed fully in John Feinstein’s A Season on the Brink (1986), which is (or used to be) the best selling sports book of all time. Things haven’t changed much with Knight since then. But Feinstein misses one essential point by focusing on Knight’s, ah, vivid personality and motivational techniques. If you have ever heard Bob Knight talk in detail about basketball, either in person or through a coaching video, you will understand. I think you would understand even if you know little or nothing about basketball.

Imagine your best professor on his or her best day on their best subject. Knight is like that. He is smart and engaging. He doesn’t yell or humiliate you. It’s basketball like you can only imagine. The passing game offense. Man to man defense using zone principles. Angles. Positioning. Matchups. Why, in the 1987 championship game, when faced with a much bigger Syracuse team that was killing Indiana on the boards, he went small with a lineup he rarely if ever used. You realize that you really didn’t know much about basketball, even if you thought that you did. You would want to play for that man, or coach under him, or just hang around, simply for the joy of learning more about the unexpected, unseen complexities of a simple game. That, ultimately, is the fascination of Knight for basketball men.

But would you want to put up with him? Ah, there is the rub. Knight can’t recruit top flight players. He could and did, once, sort of, when tough coaching styles were more acceptable, when a quick jump to the NBA wasn’t an option, when there were fewer outstanding coaches to complete with, and when there was no ESPN to show the Knight horror show. He could recruit pretty well at Indiana, a traditional basketball power, but then he managed to get fired there and had to settle at Texas Tech, a perennial bottom-dweller in the (now) Big 12, which rarely wows big-time recruits with its ambience. The man can still coach. He took a so-so Texas Tech team to the Sweet 16 a few years back, a remarkable accomplishment. But he won’t win a national championship at Texas Tech. Can you imagine the levels of play that a team as talented as North Carolina or Kansas might reach under Knight?

No, you can’t. That’s the point. You can see it, maybe, when Duke plays. And no disrespect meant to Roy Williams or Bill Self. But it’s not quite what it might be. We’ll never know.

And so the all time coaching record is all there is left to Knight, in terms of the recognition of his peers, fans and the media. The curse of Knight is, it won’t be the first thing that history remembers.