Texas Tech's Rodney Bass was on the telephone the other day, a Red Raider guard caught in the crossfire of a desperate administration colliding with the deplorable Bob Knight. He declared himself a willing candidate to play for Knight, but confessed a fear sweeping through his teammates: The coach could find the players within this 9-19 program unacceptable and start running Red Raiders straight out of scholarships.

	Bob Knight's Hoosier teams had an 8-7 record in the first round since the tournament expanded to 64 teams.

"We wondered: 'Is he going to bring his own players? What's going to happen to the players who are already here?'" Bass said.

Just imagine: Sign up for a scholarship, choose a gentleman, James Dickey, to play your college ball for, and one day, without warning, without consultation, he's gone and the administration is trying to bring Knight to the university.

Do you love Texas Tech? Do you love your major? Do you love college life? Well, tough. It's just been made unlivable for you. They're trying to bring a raving lunatic to Texas Tech, a man who long ago passed a point of no return, lost his ability to see past his own myth, past his own obsession with self-preservation.

What happens now to these poor Texas Tech Red Raiders? What, they're going to tell you they don't want to play for Knight? Of course not. If they want to stay, hold onto a scholarship, they have to shut up. Knight is visiting Lubbock on Thursday, and it appears, there's no stopping this train rumbling down the tracks.

"This team could get a lot of exposure with him next year," Bass said. "I could play for Coach Knight. My high school, and my AAU coaches coached with emotion. The more emotional the coach, the more emotional the team. I can deal with Coach Knight. It won't be a problem."

Here's a little unsolicited advice: Run Rodney, run. Get out. Neil Reed lives and works in New York City. He wouldn't do an interview on Knight, but it's ironic, because there was a time Reed was Rodney Bass, too, and believed he could play for Knight. All these kids did. Only, they had no idea. Nobody does anymore. Really, Rodney. Run.

Did you read the disturbing Playboy Magazine interview with Knight? Do you see him shilling for, essentially, a web site promoting gambling?

Nothing's changed. He's unrepentant. He's unmanageable. His world, his rules. For Knight to meet with Texas Tech officials with Dickey still on the sideline violates the most basic elementary code of conduct in the cutthroat coaching fraternity. The rules are different for Knight. They don't apply to him. He picks and chooses the ones he wants to apply to him. He demands a measure of discipline out of his players that he never holds to himself.

Why would Knight even hesitate to take the Texas Tech job? It's perfect for his needs. Here's a university president with stars in his eyes, an old coaching crony, Gerald Myers, as a puppet athletic director, a ne'er do well Big 12 program dying to make a move on Kansas, Texas and Iowa State. Knight has found a good old boy school, where it appears they're just going to let Bobby be Bobby -- just as Indiana did for most of those 29 years.

"You have to evaluate Knight's entire career and not just isolated incidents," Texas Tech president David Schmidly said. "He has a great reputation as a coach and has never had a problem with NCAA violations. I see a lot of credible things that would make this man a good basketball coach."

No NCAA violations, huh? Do human rights violations count?

At the NCAA Tournament in Buffalo last March, Knight made it clear he had shed the pretense of coaching and teaching. He was living in a perpetual state of self-preservation. Before Pepperdine destroyed the Hoosiers, Knight used his players as human shields. Shamelessly, he had Michael Lewis and A.J. Guyton march into a pre-tournament news conference armed to discredit and destroy the character of the ex-players calling Knight out on his atrocities. He had his own sports information staff passing out press releases detailing dirt on departed Hoosiers, including Reed and Richard Mandeville.

The next day, Indiana lost by 30 points to Pepperdine and the teacher's message to his students was clear: The Indiana Hoosiers hadn't come to Buffalo to win a tournament game, but restore Knight's legacy.

It isn't about his players anymore. It's about protecting Bob Knight. It's about chasing Dean Smith's record for victories. Go back and watch the tapes of his Indiana teams the past several Marches, when they were getting blown out the tournament. The body language screamed of kids desperate for the season to end, desperate to get Knight out of their life, desperate to get going on spring break.

It was this loss, the fifth season out of six that Knight couldn't get Indiana to the second round of the tournament, that left Knight vulnerable for the investigation that led to the end in Bloomington.

Years ago, Knight shared a secret with author John Feinstein: As long as the coach won, people would perceive him to be eccentric. But once he started to lose, they'd deem him an embarrassment. Maybe Knight believed this to be true, but he sure has a death wish to challenge its validity. For so long, he'd been surrounded with apologists and yes men assuring him that he would always be worth the trouble for Indiana. After five years of bad NCAA Tournament runs, Knight was no longer eccentric. He was an embarrassment.

"I talked to my mother about it," Rodney Bass said the other day. "She said that he was a good coach and maybe he wasn't going to do the things that he did at Indiana, that hopefully he had learned his lesson. She thinks it'll be a good chance for me...I've got no questions about him. He's the coach, I'm the player."

If Texas Tech won't protect Rodney Bass and the Red Raiders, well, they should protect themselves. Run kid. Run.

Adrian Wojnarowski, a columnist for the Bergen (N.J.) Record, is a regular contributor to ESPN.com. He can be reached at NJCOL1@aol.com.