The day after you sign the deal is a little late to ask the devil whether he's changed.
So go ahead Texas Tech, hire Bob Knight. Welcome him on campus with open arms, pass the hat among the alumni, wait the 10 days mandated by state law and sign the contract.
But do yourself a favor: Don't leave the behavior clause out.
Too much of what we've already heard from that far-flung corner of northwest Texas smacks of amnesia. Earlier this week, James Sowell, who heads up the Tech board of regents, said there was no point hiring a coach who needs a behavior clause. Then he turned around and said, "I think if a guy was an embarrassment to a university, that would have come up in 29 years.
"I personally wouldn't want anything to happen to this university that would be an embarrassment. But I'm willing to be open-minded."
Now all Tech needs is a promise from Knight to do the same in writing.
Since being forced out of Indiana, nothing about Knight has changed. He tried to wrest a tape recorder from a Playboy magazine interviewer while barreling down the interstate at 65 mph. He shilled for a Web site that promotes gambling on college games. And he filed notice he might sue the university that he embarrassed on and off for 29 years.
Knight still decides which rules he follows and which he ignores.
Thursday, he arrived in Lubbock and appeared briefly at a news conference, shared reminiscences of a childhood trip to the region and told out-of-town reporters to help the local economy by going out to eat. He promised that within days he would reveal a "foolproof" way of dealing with the media, then left without taking questions. The whole thing wrapped up just minutes before his old school tipped off in the NCAA tournament.
Coincidence? Maybe. But at the very least, he left the Tech people time to tune in the Indiana game afterward and be reassured that there is life after Bob.
Lubbock might not be the end of the college basketball world, but as the saying goes, you can see it from there. Yet the place was already buzzing in a way it hadn't in years. Faculty members fired off angry e-mails to one another and dropped off a petition at Tech president David Schmidly's office pleading with him not to hire Knight.
The university had better have a Plan B. Right now, the only plan in place for dealing with Knight is Gerald Myers, an old coaching crony who is the athletics director at Tech. When the school opened its new arena in 1999, Knight did Myers a huge favor by bringing his Indiana team there to christen the joint. By some happy coincidence, the street running in front of the building is named Indiana.
Myers knows exactly what he's getting. Knight will make Texas Tech competitive in the Big 12 almost immediately. He will run a clean program. He will graduate nearly all of his players, something Tech's athletics programs have found troublesome. Knight will also generate more publicity in a week than James Dickey, his predecessor, could during all but one week of his tenure.
Yet it was that one week that should give the rest of the Tech administrators pause. Schmidly should remember how unseemly it looked to court Knight before letting Dickey know he'd lost the job.
That kind of notoriety is part of any bargain with Knight. He will get Tech to 20 wins a season and the NCAA tournament in a hurry. But Knight will need a half-dozen seasons or more to pass former North Carolina coach Dean Smith on the career wins list.
Living with Knight is going to require an open mind and an athletics director willing to look the other way. At the minimum, slip a behavior clause into the deal and put a law firm on retainer. Otherwise, the only authority Knight will ever recognize is his own.
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