Bobby Knight

Upon graduating from Ohio State in 1962, Knight immediately had two high school coaching offers to deal with. Though at one school he could have made more money coaching football as well as basketball, Knight chose instead to take the lesser of the two positions, wanting to focus his energies on the basketball program. He later told Sports Illustrated, "I thought, if I'm going to be a basketball coach, I can't be diverted. I wanted vertical concentration." Soon he was offered an assistant coaching position at the United States Military Academy, and by the time he was 24, Knight was the head coach at the Academy, becoming the youngest head coach in major college history.

Knight remained at the Military Academy for six years (he had to enlist in the Army to get the position). He was already compiling winning numbers that would follow him, for the most part, for the rest of his career. Army was never much of a basketball school, but in his six seasons there, Coach Knight took the team to four NIT playoffs, and ended his career at the school with a record of 102-50.

In 1971, Knight took a position with Indiana University, fulfilling his childhood dream of coaching at a Big Ten school. They took their basketball very seriously in Indiana (see the film Hoosiers), and in Coach Knight they got a man who took the definition of serious to a completely different realm.