During my 40-year coaching career at West Point, Indiana and Texas Tech, my teams reached the Final Four on five occasions, winning the national championship three times.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
There are one-hundred fifty-four games in a season and you can find one-hundred fifty-four reasons why your team should have won every one of them.
And then to end up with a total of 347 wins, averaging 10 regular season wins for 33 years and the best winning percentage, and I'm very proud of this, of any professional team from 1970 to 1996.
We didn't think we were a fourth-place team. For us to beat the first-place team in the West and the first-place team in the East shows the dedication and determination that we had.
I never brought it up when I coached, but I have close ties at Ohio State. Unfortunately, I even have a graduate degree from there.
I led the state in defensive interceptions my senior year, with seven in nine games. Then I went to Montana to play basketball and found out quickly that my college career wasn't going to work out how I'd envisioned it.
In college, I probably lost a total of about 11 games, and then I came to the Celtics and in my first three weeks we went on a nine-game losing streak.
At the end of the day, if you're not beating the teams on the road recruiting that you have to beat on the field, then you're probably not going to win many championships.
Every year you suit up, you play for a championship. Some years, some teams... it was very few times I think I played on that realistically had a chance.
Georgia Tech beat us and Mississippi Southern tied us last year, and Texas beat us after we had the game won. We only played about five games the way we were capable of playing and lost one of those.
I might not have a conference championship or a national championship as a head coach, but I had the recruiting factor.