Spittle flying and veins popping, Nick Nolte's Pete Bell is the prototype of the Bobby Knight-like basketball coach whose play diagramming is exceeded only by his irascible personality. Blue Chips opens with his total verbal castration of a locker room of chastened athletes, then ups the wicked satirical level by having Bell, in full pouting diva mode, punt a ball into the stands during the game. This prepares the viewer for the possibility that the director who achieved widespread acclaim for his atypical cop movie (The French Connection) and horror movie (The Exorcist) might round out his resumé with an atypical sports movie. But William Friedkin's unexpected foray into this genre can't live up to its promising start. It softens Bell into a vacillating pawn with far more bark than bite, diminishing Nolte's wonderfully realized portrayal. The film's recruiting violations and other compromised ethics are well worth examining, but they follow many of the expected avenues of this type of behavior. Blue Chips does create a believable sense of the pressure cooker world that would imperil a ridiculously successful coach after a single losing season. With help from real sports personalities playing both characters and themselves, including Knight offering an uncharacteristically sportsmanlike self-parody, Friedkin and screenwriter/sports enthusiast Ron Shelton score a slam dunk on realism. For viewers entrenched in this world, pointing out the cameos will be just the beginning of the fun. However, the uninitiated may find too few insights to sustain them.