[7.3/10] A fascinating story about how winning in major college athletics gives a person power and protection, which can be almost impenetrable, even in the face of hard evidence. The tale of Bobby Knight's rise in college basketball, his style and the excuses made for it, and his slow but steady downfall as the story of his abuses broke is an engrossing one. More to the point, the documentary hinges on the conspiracy of silence, excuse, and denial that allowed his behavior to persist unchecked for so long.

My one complaint is that writer/director Robert Abbott makes a lot of this about him. At a pure craft level, his voiceovers are pretty corny and not delivered terribly well. (Some of them, frankly, made me laugh out loud.) But beyond that eminently forgivable sin, the greater problem is that Abbott was the one who broke this story originally, and much of the tale to tell here is about the resistance he faced and his choices along the way. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it makes Abbott both the director and a major subject of the documentary, which doesn’t just lead to an excusable conflict of interest, but which, more significantly, ends up putting the spotlight on what *he* was thinking and feeling during all of this rather than putting more of the focus on the school, Knight, and most importantly Neil Reid.

But as much as that irks me when the movie goes over the core details of these events, it’s arguably worth it for the end of the film, where Abbott not only expresses contrition for zeroing in on those details at the expense of missing what Reed was going through after coming forward, but illustrates the life that Reed led after this experience. There are few things more heartening than seeing how Reed, in many ways, became the anti-Bobby Knight in how he treated the kids he coached and the people he worked with. His story is a tragic one given his all-too-soon death, but there’s something very inspirational in the bittersweet ending here, both for Reed’s triumphs away from the three ring circus of major college sports and for Abbott, despite all his self-indulgent bloviating here and despite his legitimately great reporting in breaking the original news, expressing some regret for missing the human angle of the story.

Overall, some of the packaging leaves something to be desired here, but this is still an engrossing illustration of institutional inertia and excuse gone terribly wrong, and how bad things like Knight’s behavior are allowed to be perpetuated.