Bad information to the numerous, many Duke-basketball haters on the market: It seems that you simply’re going to have to put up with the Blue Devils in all of their punchable smugness, with their fade haircuts and the thin blue letters on their swelling chests, their floor-smacking protection and their clear, net-twitching pictures, for at the very least one other day, if not one other era.
Four years after Jon Scheyer took over as head coach from the legendary Mike Krzyzewski, his document is a marvel: At simply 38, he has reached 100 wins quicker than every other coach in Atlantic Coast Conference historical past, and for the second 12 months in a row, he has the NCAA event’s top-seeded workforce—if a shaky, younger one. His 42–2 mark towards convention rivals up to now two seasons is so dominant that when North Carolina lastly bought a win this season, followers stormed the courtroom—in February. “He’s done a magnificent job,” Krzyzewski advised me this week. He added that various instances, “I’ve said, ‘You’ve done that better than I would have if I stayed on.’”
Succession is among the many most tough passages for any group, however particularly so for sports activities groups headed by coaches who change into monuments. By all rights, when Krzyzewski retired in 2022, after 47 seasons, because the winningest coach within the historical past of the boys’s NCAA Division I, Duke ought to have been achieved as a model, extra lifeless than Sears. The life ought to have been drained out of its pupil physique, that feral organism that the NBC announcer Al McGuire as soon as taunted with a pith helmet, a whip, and a chair at Cameron Indoor Stadium, saying, “Get back, you animals, get back!” It’s been 50 years, and UCLA is nonetheless attempting to find a dynastic substitute for the 10-time NCAA champion John Wooden; the workforce has received only one title since he stepped down in 1975. His successor, Gene Bartow, give up after two years, so instantly drained was he of being pressure-sweated by the snarling, discontented, success-spoiled constituency. “I wasn’t even worried about getting fired,” he said in 1990. “Now, assassinated, that’s a different thing.”
When Scheyer accepted the job, he knew all of this. “You’re not supposed to be the guy that follows the guy,” he stated at a press convention quickly after he was employed. “You want to be the guy who follows the guy who follows the guy.”
Krzyzewski spent years pondering by way of his succession plan—not solely how to execute a transition with out ego or stress, but additionally what kind of temperament can be required within the workforce’s subsequent chief. “Not many coaches truly want the program to succeed once they’re done,” Scheyer said. Even fewer take the difficulty to go on an prolonged hunt for the appropriate character. Of all Krzyzewski’s achievements, his profitable fostering of Scheyer could qualify as a “masterstroke,” the previous Duke participant turned ESPN announcer Jay Bilas advised me. Some of Scheyer’s bench acumen was on show within the first spherical of the NCAA event yesterday, when he rallied his predominantly freshmen workforce from a 13-point deficit to survive an upset bid by the Sixteenth-seeded Siena University, 71–65. “Toughest moment, toughest game, toughest position I’ve ever been in in the tournament,” a relieved Scheyer said afterward.
It took some form of nerve for Krzyzewski to again a man who had by no means been a head coach earlier than and whose lead high quality is self-deprecation. A bland-seeming type, Scheyer lacks the overt superciliousness and elite carriage related to different Dukies, corresponding to JJ Redick, who in 2024 turned the coach of the Los Angeles Lakers. “I think the first year or two, you’re just trying to survive. Just straight up, you’re just trying to survive,” Scheyer stated final week—after profitable his third ACC title in 4 years and ending the common season with the highest rating within the nation.
Krzyzewski had stress with Duke officers over selecting Scheyer. According to Krzyzewski’s biographer, Ian O’Connor, the college preferred different Krzyzewski apprentices, corresponding to Tommy Amaker, who had achieved the not possible and made Harvard aggressive, and Johnny Dawkins, who was constructing one thing on the University of Central Florida. Krzyzewski has cherished few gamers the best way he loves Amaker and Dawkins, guards who led his first Final Four workforce in 1986. But he was completely satisfied that the appropriate successor was already within the seat subsequent to him on the bench: Scheyer, who’d served as his assistant for eight years, had a mix of strategic perception and flooring notion that set him an inch aside. “He’s one of the smartest coaches in the country,” Krzyzewski stated on the day the succession plan was introduced. “Nobody knows that as well as I do.”
Krzyzewski has identified Scheyer since he was 16. He first recruited Scheyer as a excessive schooler out of the Chicago suburb of Northbrook, Illinois, the place Scheyer was a thin however stealthy playmaker, a dead-eyed shooter, and a ferocious competitor often known as “the Jewish Michael Jordan.” In one notable efficiency, he scored 52 factors, 21 of these in simply 75 seconds, in a frantic effort to rally his workforce throughout a event recreation. According to Bilas, Scheyer is, quietly, “as competitive as any player” who’s ever been at Duke. His spouse, Marcelle, as soon as advised Sports Illustrated that she refuses to play even Monopoly with him.
From 2006 to 2010, Scheyer competed in a boiling-oil atmosphere during which the Blue Devils had been so loathed by anybody not a Dukie that at lunch counters, he frightened about cooks spitting in his meals. A North Carolina fan in an apron would joke, “Hey, I’m gonna mess with your sandwich,” Scheyer said on the time. “And they are joking, I think. But honestly, it makes me want to watch my food being made, to make sure.” Some gamers struggled with the fixed jeering hatred and efficiency strain—Redick went right into a depression—however Scheyer appeared imperturbable. When requested by a reporter who would inherit the mantle of “most hated Dukie,” Scheyer responded, “I would hope myself.” Krzyzewski acknowledged that contained in the mundane-looking child was an incurable gamesman who didn’t simply cope properly with strain—he preferred it.
Krzyzewski summoned Scheyer again to Duke as an assistant in 2013. Scheyer had suffered a freak eye damage in NBA summer-league play that destroyed his probabilities of making a membership, and after temporary stints enjoying abroad in Israel and Spain, he was trolling for a job. He contemplated apprenticing at Northwestern below Chris Collins, a former Blue Devils coach and participant, however then Krzyzewski referred to as and upbraided him for even serious about going anyplace however Duke. According to Scheyer, Krzyzewski’s sell went like this: “Don’t be an idiot. Come back here.”
Krzyzewski had a long-standing desire for filling assistant-coaching seats together with his former gamers. It’s clear now that this wasn’t simply favoritism and Dukian self-regard. It turned a part of his plan. “I knew one of these guys was going to take my place,” Krzyzewski advised me. “So they were constantly being trained to do that.” He tended to rent guys like Scheyer, former guards who understood the motion throughout the entire flooring, who had been workforce captains, who had an affinity for accountability. Krzyzewski distributed equal workloads to his coaches no matter age or expertise, all of them collaborating in scouting and recreation planning, and promotions got here usually as senior coaches cycled out of this system and bought their very own head jobs. “I told them right from the start, ‘You’re not coming here to be an assistant,’” Krzyzewski advised me. “‘I want you to be thinking as a head coach every day.’” It took Scheyer simply 5 years to earn the title of affiliate head coach. By 2021, a dozen of Krzyzewski’s former assistants can be serving as collegiate head coaches, and 4 made this 12 months’s NCAA event.
Krzyzewski coached one final season, 2021–22, with Scheyer by his facet for a 12 months of tutelage. At the time, it was a controversial transfer, one which appeared to invite all types of potential battle and emotional messes. Critics charged that Krzyzewski was a holier-than-thou hypocrite who simply needed a farewell ego tour and couldn’t let go. As it occurred, Krzyzewski’s closing season completed on a be aware of triumph as he reached one final Final Four, and Scheyer thought-about the 12 months he spent because the designated-in-waiting an indispensable expertise. It “made it more real for me,” he said later. Daily, he and Krzyzewski talked by way of choices: What’s occurring in his thoughts? Why did Krzyzewski name a time-out when he did? How to shake a participant out of his nerves? “The conversations we had behind closed doors,” Scheyer stated, “were some of the most impactful I’ve ever had with him.”
When Krzyzewski turned this system over to Scheyer, he gave him the best reward he might, other than the job itself: He publicly disappeared. He didn’t attend a Duke recreation in particular person for 2 years, although Scheyer stated they remained “close as can be.” By fading from view, Scheyer stated, Krzyzewski gave him “amazing room to be myself.”
Among Scheyer’s most important departures from his predecessor: He has sought a broader combine for his teaching workers, hiring from exterior the “family” of former Duke gamers that Krzyzewski tended to favor. He has additionally put in an offensive scheme that’s noticeably faster-paced than Krzyzewski’s. He is a unique sideline presence than the profane, obviously intense Krzyzewski, however a presence nonetheless—a cool cat who’s all poise.
Scheyer did have some moments of self-doubt throughout the transition. “You’re not completely sure if everything you’re doing is right,” Krzyzewski stated. “But just about everything he did was right.”
If so, give Krzyzewski partial credit score. He was proper that Scheyer’s youth—he’s the youngest head coach within the ACC by a few decade—was not a downside however a energy. With the sport present process fast change due to the brand new personal-branding rights for pupil athletes, launched in 2021, a brand new head coach wanted to be as present as attainable, and never nostalgic, in accordance to Krzyzewski. Scheyer’s adaptability has proved important: Despite NCAA guidelines adjustments in every of his first 4 years, he has introduced in elite recruiting courses, with successive Player of the Year candidates in Cooper Flagg final 12 months and now Cam Boozer, a projected NBA high choose.
Scheyer does share some qualities together with his former boss. They’re each “anal preparers,” Krzyzewski advised me. And they each view technique as secondary to the flexibility to attain gamers emotionally in a giant second. If you’ll be able to’t really feel the sport “during the moment it’s going on,” Krzyzewski stated, “you should be a TV analyst.”
Which just isn’t to say that every one of Scheyer’s emotions have been victorious. In the Final Four final 12 months, Duke collapsed, dropping a six-point lead to Houston within the recreation’s ultimate 35 seconds. “I’m sure there’s a lot more that I could have done to help our guys at the end there,” Scheyer stated on the time. “That’s the thing that kills me.”
But any hope Duke rivals had that the dynasty may fizzle was short-lived. Scheyer is so resourceful and his workforce this season is so deeply gifted that even when it misplaced two starters, Caleb Foster and Patrick Ngongba II, to foot accidents, it defended its ACC event title to safe the NCAA event’s high seed—regardless of having only a seven-man rotation that features 4 freshmen and a sophomore. He remained with out each Foster and Ngongba within the scare with Siena. Just forward of that recreation, Scheyer reflected that though the Duke job comes with strain and the chance that “you can have your heart broken,” he’d “rather have that any day of the week than not be in this position.”
Duke’s bracket this 12 months is loaded with upset-minded opponents, together with the No. 8 seed, Ohio State; St. Johns at No. 5; Kansas at No. 4; and the University of Connecticut at No. 2. And this time, something lower than a championship will undoubtedly invite restlessness from followers and disparagement from rivals. That’s merely how a succession narrative goes. But no matter occurs throughout the event, Scheyer has made his workforce a spring perennial once more. Maybe your grandkids will inherit a March Madness with out Duke.
