Die-hard backers of Bob Knight, who was fired as Indiana University at Bloomington’s men’s basketball coach nearly six years ago, lost another round last week in their quixotic effort to have the dismissal reversed. In a unanimous ruling, a three-judge panel of the Indiana Court of Appeals said that the state’s open-meetings law was essentially irrelevant to the university trustees’ decision to delegate authority to the university president to act in the matter of Coach Knight, who had had a series of disciplinary run-ins in the years before his firing (The Chronicle, September 22, 2000). In its ruling, the appeals court upheld a lower court’s decision to dismiss the lawsuit before trial.

In the years since Mr. Knight was fired, he has landed quite comfortably at Texas Tech University (The Chronicle, March 23, 2001). And the president who fired him, Myles Brand, has risen to president of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (The Chronicle, October 11, 2002), where in a sense he once again is keeping an eye on Coach Knight.