This week I celebrate and grieve two great coaches of NCAA basketball: Tennessee women’s coach, Pat Summitt, and Texas Tech coach of three years, Bobby Knight.

Summitt had one of the best nights of her career when she became the winningest basketball coach in NCAA history, surpassing North Carolina men’s coach Dean Smith with 880 wins in a victory over Purdue last Tuesday.

A woman now holds the record for most wins in NCAA basketball history. A woman who took over the program at Tennessee when she was only 22 years old, without scholarships, having to wash the team uniforms and drive the team van herself.

Now, normally I bleed the burnt orange of another UT: Texas. But Tennessee has made its way into my bloodstream because of Summitt. I love this woman, and we go way back.

Back in my basketball days in high school, (as the manager of our team) I drew out and memorized every play Summitt ever used in competition for our coach to use with our girls.

When I watch Summitt on the court now, I notice that her plays are still the same as they were three years ago, with a few new ones thrown in with the same fundamentals of the game she has always kept. But she’s still winning games and it doesn’t look like she’s stopping anytime soon. You’ll have to kill her first.

Her hard work paid off and now she has a gym named after her, “The Summitt.” This one’s for the girls.

I was still on my Summitt high as I sat on a barstool at the Bulldog last Thursday night, watching NCAA highlights on the flat screen above the bar, when my high was ripped right out from under me by the score of 60-65 flashing on the score ticker.

Texas Tech was five points short. Bobby Knight’s Red Raiders came up empty against the West Virginia Mountaineers.

Despite his incessant anger, Knight is a good coach who coaches the game the way it should be coached, and he takes care of his players. He has one of the highest graduation rates in a college basketball program in the country.

But I still think I could listen to him trash talk reporters all day long.

I forgot how hardcore Knight was for a second, until I sat on that barstool still in shock and still asphyxiated on ESPN. I don’t have cable, so bars are the only access I have to SportsCenter. They were showing a TV movie about Knight, depicting him making players cry and re-enacting the infamous chair throwing incident in 1984.

Ah, 1984. I remember it well. I think I was all of a month old, but thanks to ESPN Classic, I feel like I was there on the other side of that hardwood floor, catching that chair right in the kisser.

That movie was like a smack in the face an hour or so after they had just lost, but it made me remember how great Knight really is.

I’ll never forget when I saw Knight in the gym of my high school once, while recruiting a player for Tech. I stood there, waiting for him to throw something. I have a problem with celebrity, be it even minor celebrity.

I think I’ll send him a fruit basket to drown his sorrows in a Georgia peach, or some other fruit that doesn’t grow in West Virginia.

Back to March Madness. I thought the Texas Tech women and the Lady Vols matched up well, but Tennessee came out on top. Tennessee will without a doubt be in the final, but in the end, I think this is LSU’s year. As for the guys … you’ll have to ask Ryan Arena after I bust him out of the asylum that March Madness has put him in.