Colts lose Rhodes & Harper? It's OK.

Bob Knight has coached for around 40 years. His teams have won three national championships and almost 900 games with very few true "superstar" players - his teams have produced a grand total of one NBA All-Star (Isiah Thomas). The bulk of his players who did advance to the next level turned out to be busts (Steve Alford, Uwe Blab, Eric Anderson) or, at best, journeymen (Scott May, Quinn Buckner, Dean Garrett). This isn't a knock on Coach Knight – I'm bringing this up to illustrate a bigger point.

Bob Knight broke Dean Smith's Division I men's basketball coaching wins record because his system works. He recruited the right players – players who may not have been McDonald's All-Americans coming out of high school, but who nevertheless played smart and bought into Knight's team-first system. He could win 20 games a season anywhere in college basketball (and has proven so much at Texas Tech) – he could make Northwestern a perennial contender.

It's the Indianapolis Colts' recent free-agent defections of Dominic Rhodes and Nick Harper that cause me to think about this. Both players were an integral part of the Super Bowl champions, and both have opted to go elsewhere for more money (Rhodes, in particular, may get the bulk of the carries in Oakland, while Harper will likely slide right into a starting role in Tennessee).

Colts fans, don't be too devastated about the loss of these two fine players. Tony Dungy's system works also, and I think that both players will struggle in their new environs because the systems in place for those teams won't work to their advantage nearly as well as the Colts' did. (See also James, Edgerrin.) Rhodes has already proven that he can't be the primary ground option, but did phenomenally well when splitting carries with James or Joseph Addai. Harper is a little undersized, but like the rest of the Colts' defense, he's quick when someone isn't stabbing him in the leg.

Coach Dungy and the Colts will do as they've done recently with great success: plug their replacements into the system, pay them considerably less money and yet continue to win 10-12 games a season. One of these years, the strategy will come back to bite them, but I don't see it happening this year.