Journalists — former defenders of free speech — want Bobby Knight silenced

Behold the herd mentality of sports journalists.

The latest strange display of sports writers parroting one another without providing much actual thought comes from the Midwest, where sportswriters and commentators are calling for ESPN to fire former college hoops head coach Bobby Knight from serving as color man for Big Monday basketball broadcasts.

An AM 810 sports radio broadcaster in Kansas City, Kevin Kietzman, started the Bobby Knight pile-on by launching an online petition on Tuesday calling for ESPN to can Knight and his play-by-play man Brent Musburger. The reason? Well, check out the Web site. It’s not clear at all. It appears that this sports radio jock thinks Knight doesn’t know much about basketball, even though there’s no mention of Kietzman’s extensive basketball background on his radio station bio. But he does admit he makes a lot of mistakes (hey, don’t we all?).

Acting almost on cue, Kansas City Star columnist Jason Whitlock followed the next day with several hundred words devoted to calling for Knight’s head. Whitlock’s reason? Knight’s suggestion during the Kansas Jayhawk’s Monday night victory that coach Bill Self remove All-American sharpshooter Sherron Collins at the beginning of a second half against Texas A&M when Collins, by Whitlock’s own estimation, was having a terrible game.

The same day, the Lawrence Journal-World, the hometown newspaper for the Jayhawks, ran a piece quoting Self on a radio show responding to Knight — a color man — expressing an opinion that Self’s best player should get benched. The article frames Self as “keeping his cool” as he crafted a response, as though everyone were expecting Self to blow his top over Knight’s benign comments. Apparently Self didn’t agree with Knight but also didn’t seem to care all that much.

Nevertheless, that makes at least two news media outlets publishing or broadcasting screeds calling for the silencing of a broadcaster.

So much for the media sticking up for First Amendment rights.

Knight’s actually a breath of fresh commentary in sports television to anyone who understands the game. As a championship NCAA coach, he clearly knows his game. He’s also not afraid to criticize player for taking bad shots or coaches for questionable decisions rather than sucking up to athletes. Most importantly, he sees no need for threadbare cliches that most color men spend like millionaires with on-air currency. Never do you hear Knight saying that so-and-so “just loves to play the game” or that so-and-so can “elevate his team to the next level” or other such nonsense we’ve become used to hearing from the likes of Chris Collinsworth.

True, Knight’s not particularly politically correct. But neither was Howard Cosell.

True, Knight’s prone to making a mistake or two during a broadcast. But so was Harry Carey.

By Tuesday, Kietzman’s online petition had gathered a yawn-inducing 1,500 electronic signatures. We’re guessing that by the time the petition gets delivered to Big 12 Conference Commissioner Dan Beebe in March, it won’t have the billion or so signatures it would require to even have the administrator give it a second thought.