Jason Collier

How do you judge Jason Collier? A spoiled brat who fled Indiana when things got tough? Or a sensible young man who wisely chose to get out when Bobby Knight’s verbal abuse became intolerable?

There’s probably a semblance of truth in both points of view.

“It’s not necessarily all his fault that I left,” said Collier, who transferred to Georgia Tech this season because of his deteriorating relationship with Knight. “I think it was a little bit my fault, too. There’s always two sides to the story.”

This much is clear: Even though Collier won’t be able to play until December because of the NCAA’s transfer rule, he finally seems at peace with himself.

He’s able to sleep and eat, and he’s not fretting constantly.

“My girlfriend thinks I’ve turned my whole life around,” said Collier, wearing a blue-and-gold Yellow Jackets cap and relaxing in a cushy chair at Georgia Tech. “She came to visit me a couple of weeks ago and couldn’t believe how much different I was.”

Collier, a 7-foot sophomore from Springfield, Ohio, quit Indiana in December, saying he no longer could take Knight’s incessant criticism and in-your-face coaching style.

While initially praising Knight as “the smartest man I’ve ever met,” it took just a year and few games for Collier to realize he had made a serious mistake.

“I just couldn’t put up with the constant yelling,” Collier said. “It never changed. I think it’s good to a point to get yelled at and stuff like that. But you’ve also got to have someone there to slap you on the butt and tell you it’s OK.”

The Indiana coach’s best tactic is fear, pure and simple.

How did a seemingly quiet, reflective teen-ager like Collier decide to play for the fiery man in the red sweater?

“That’s where I blame myself a little bit for going to Indiana,” Collier said. “People tell you it’s going to be tough, people tell you it’s the hardest thing in the world to do for four years. But you’re 18 years old, coming out of high school, and you’re thinking, ‘Yeah, whatever. I can do it. Guys have done it before me.’ But you don’t know what you’re getting into until you do it.”

Knight, whose team was 17-7 going into the weekend, said he was caught off guard by Collier’s decision.

“He told me he really wanted to play here and learn to be a really good player and be the best player he could be and had no interest whatsoever in leaving here,” Knight said in December.

The beneficiary of the falling out was Georgia Tech coach Bobby Cremins, who had lost the recruiting battle two years ago. Next season, the Yellow Jackets will have a former Mr. Ohio Basketball who averaged 9.4 points as a Big Ten freshman and 10.7 points in this abbreviated season.

“I think the world of this kid,” Cremins said. “I loved the kid when I recruited him. It was a Christmas gift when he decided to come here.”

But Cremins doesn’t care to know the details of the rift.

“I told Jason that Bobby Knight is a friend of mine and I’ve got great respect for him,” the Georgia Tech coach said. “We could blame coach Knight for this and that, but I’m sure Jason wasn’t mature enough to handle some of the things that happened.”

Collier played center at Indiana, but the Yellow Jackets are set at that position for three more years with shot-blocking phenom Alvin Jones. So Collier will move to power forward, where he feels more comfortable anyway because of his outside shooting skills.

“The first practice here, they threw the balls out on the floor and the coaches were like, ‘Let’s see if you’ve still got a 3-point shot.’ I buried like five in a row,” Collier said, grinning.

While Knight was the main reason he left Indiana, Collier can see in hindsight that other things troubled him.

When he strolls around the campus at Georgia Tech, Collier towers above the other students but doesn’t feel separated from them. He said that’s a 180-degree change from the atmosphere in basketball-crazy Indiana.

“It’s very, very prestigious to be on the Indiana basketball team,” Collier said. “I would go to class and people were looking at me like they were afraid to talk to me because I played basketball at Indiana. It was kind of neat at first because you have a lot of power. But it got to the point where I was like, ‘Geez, I just want to be a college student.”’

Now, he’s at the same school where his father, Jeff, played center from 1972-76.

“Better late than never,” Jason said, grinning again.