Blue Chips is a 1994 American sports drama film, directed by William Friedkin, written by Ron Shelton and starring Nick Nolte as a college basketball coach trying to recruit a winning team.

His players were portrayed by actors as well as real-life basketball stars Shaquille O'Neal and Anfernee "Penny" Hardaway and cameos include noted basketball figures Bob Knight, Rick Pitino, George Raveling, Bob Cousy, Larry Bird, Jerry Tarkanian, Matt Painter, Allan Houston, Dick Vitale, Jim Boeheim, Dan Dakich and Bobby Hurley, as well as actor Louis Gossett Jr.

While the film was released to mixed reviews, general assessment of Blue Chips has become more favorable in the decades since and it has been listed as one of the best sports movies of all time by Rolling Stone, Yardbarker and The Athletic.

This includes offering a new car to the gigantic Neon Boudeaux (Shaq), a house and job to the mother of Butch McRae, and a tractor to the father of farmboy Ricky Roe, as well as a bag filled with cash.

His ex-wife, a former guidance counselor, agrees to tutor Neon, who has below average grades, but she feels betrayed when she realizes Pete lied to her about the new athletes receiving illegal inducements to attend the school.

Western University has a big nationally televised game coming up versus Indiana, the #1 team in the country, coached by Bob Knight.

[2] The project languished in development hell being bounced from Time Life to MGM and followed by 20th Century Fox where then studio head, Joe Roth, put the script into Turnaround right before White Men Can't Jump opened to commercial and critical success.

Blue Chips features several famous players and coaches playing themselves, Jerry Tarkanian, Rick Pitino, Matt Painter, and Jim Boeheim among them.

Legendary Boston Celtics point guard and Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame member Bob Cousy has a role as the athletic director of the college where Pete Bell is coach.

The website's consensus reads: "Director William Friedkin is working with a strong cast, but an excess of sentimentality renders this basketball drama more than a little flat.

But, like The Program, this strident, unconvincing bit of movie muckraking uses our national sports mania to decoy us into sitting through a dreary lecture about ethics and moral corner-cutting.

As the coach who exchanges his soul for a winning program, Nick Nolte struts and bellows in a desperate attempt to bring his character to life, and though he works up quite a lather, all he gets for the effort is sweat stains.

[..] What Friedkin brings to the story is a tone that feels completely accurate; the movie is a morality play, told in the realistic, sometimes cynical terms of modern high-pressure college sports.