Blue & Gold Illustrated: America's Foremost Authority on Notre Dame Football
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"His favorite shot [was] a two-foot jump shot," Cooley said of Knight's lacking physicality. "Tom's a really nice jump shooter, too. He can move really well around the ball and outside on the perimeter, whereas I can stay on the block now. Just to have both of us in there is great to see. To have another 6-10 guy on the court who can play defense as well as he can is just huge." So is getting a midseason jolt of joy for a group grinding away, still trying to find its identity and hoping to meet high preseason expectations. "It's just great to see Tom doing well," Cooley added. "Just to see how well he plays in practice and then to go out there and see Tom doing well gets everyone really fired up. I love playing with him; I love playing with him almost more than anyone else on this team. It's great to have us both out there. "When you see one guy just loving it out there, it reminds everyone why we're out there, why we're playing. It's to have fun. I think it's one of the reasons why we clicked so well in the second half [at South Florida], just seeing how much fun we were having together as a team and playing so well." ✦ Will Going Big Lead To Getting Better? The indefinite loss of sixth-year senior guard Scott Martin, whose twice surgically repaired left knee began causing too much pain by mid-January, forced Notre Dame men's basketball head coach Mike Brey to go with a two-forward lineup. With veteran senior Jack Cooley (6-10) now working in tandem with classmate Tom Knight (6-10), it's the largest starting group, Brey said, since his first season with the Fighting Irish in 2000-01. "Probably the last time we played as much three around two as we did [beginning with South Florida Jan. 26] was [Ryan] Humphrey, [Troy] Murphy, [Harold] Swanagan. We were more three around two with those teams. This is a flashback to my first two years. We've been more four around one [since]." Murphy, a senior then, measured in at 6-11 and Humphrey, also a senior, stood at 6-8. Swanagan, a junior at the time who relied more on his horizontal size, was 6-7. Swanagan is in his fourth year on the Notre Dame staff as basketball operations director. Murphy and Humphrey combined evenly for 44.6 points and 18.3 rebounds per game that year, when the Irish finished 20-10 and won a Big East West Division title. Swanagan, similar to Knight, got called up to the starting lineup later in the year and averaged 4.1 points and 3.4 rebounds with 15 starts. Through the end of January this season, Cooley, junior guards Eric Atkins and Jerian Grant, and sophomore guard Pat Connaughton all were averaging at least 10 points per game. Whatever Knight can provide offensively will be a bonus, and his production baseline is to defend and rebound. "I actually pulled some tape out to just look at our spacing and what we did when we got into highlow," Brey said. "Sometimes you can get congestion in the high post and our perimeter is still feeling like, if we've got a big in there, don't run in there. Stay away and let those guys look at high-low." — Wes Morgan