Can Duke avoid becoming the next Indiana or UCLA?

Is Jon Scheyer the man that can keep Duke, Duke?

Mike Krzyzewski’s decision to announce his retirement ten months before his actual retirement did not really catch anyone by surprise, at least not anyone that’s been paying attention.

Rumors have been circulating since mid-April that there was going to be some momentous decision coming out of Durham at some point this summer. Tate Frazier of Titus & Tate called this a month ago. He wasn’t just spitballing. Coach K is 74 years old. He just went through one of the toughest seasons of his career in a year that wore down every single person on this planet. I’m sure I’m not alone in saying that 2020 made me reevaluate the things that I find important in life. Every single one of us restructured our priorities, and Coach K was no different.

Combine that with the seismic changes coming to the sport of college basketball — the looming NIL legislation, the transfer portal, the never-ending talent drain to the professional ranks, the fact that in this day and age, you build rosters instead of programs — and it’s understandable that an old dog didn’t want to learn another new trick.

He’s done that enough.

He won a title in 2010 with a team that had a bunch of bigs and vets. He won a title in 2015 with a team that played four guards and was made up of freshmen. He’s coached for four decades and won titles in three of them. He built two different dynasties, from 1986-1994 and from 1999-2002. Reinventing the way you do your job every five years isn’t easy.

But why ten months in advance?

The easy answer, the one that the anti-Duke crowd will spend the rest of Coach K’s career harping on, is that the man’s ego couldn’t survive without a Farewell Tour. He’s an icon, one of the few human beings on the planet whose specter looms over the sport. He’s college basketball’s Derek Jeter, its Kobe Bryant. He’s an institution, and the only way for an institution’s reign to end is to make the celebration last for a full season.

Frankly, it’s probably not entirely wrong.

And while the jokes are easy to make, this is what we do in American sports. When an icon calls it quits, we give them their flowers.

But I don’t think that this decision, that announcing his final season will be his final season before his final season starts, is simply an attempt to get a standing ovation in every ACC arena Duke visits this season. I believe him when Coach K says that he couldn’t, in good conscience, recruit players knowing that he would be lying to them about who they would be playing for. Coach K has some serious holier-than-thou, do the right thing at all costs vibes. The reason why we see him do things like scold Dillon Brooks or lecture a student reporter on how to ask questions in a press conference is because he believes he’s the arbiter of all that is right and wrong. He has the wisdom like Arby’s has the meats.

Whether you believe he’s doing this because it’s the right thing to do or because he knows it will give him the moral high ground depends on your level of cynicism. I’m OK giving K the benefit of the doubt here.

That said, I also believe that Coach K understands the task at hand for the man that has been tabbed as his replacement: Jon Scheyer. Currently Duke’s associate head coach, Scheyer was the starting point guard for the Blue Devils just 11 years ago, recently enough that I covered the title he won at Duke. Taking over for a legend is an unenviable task in any walk of life. When you’re replacing the most recognizable face in college sports, a man that’s won five titles, coached Team USA and built Duke into the single-biggest and richest brand in college hoops, living up to the standards of the man you replace is damn near impossible.

If Jon Scheyer doesn’t become a top five coach of all-time, he’s a downgrade. Imagine working with that level of expectation and pressure.

I think about UCLA. No one has ever dominated a sport the way that John Wooden’s Bruins dominated college basketball in the late-60’s and early-70’s. In the last 40 years, the Bruins have been to five Final Fours. They’ve won one title. The number of seasons that would qualify as good seasons by Wooden-era standards can be counted on one hand. Outside of a three-year run in the middle of Ben Howland’s tenure and a recent resurgence under Mick Cronin, the Bruins have largely just kinda been … there.

Waiting.

For the right man to return them to the glory days.

Indiana is an even better example, and one that will certainly be at the forefront of Coach K’s consciousness; the man that coached him in college, that got him into the business of basketball after he graduated, was Bob Knight. For 21 years since Knight was unceremoniously forced out of Bloomington, the Indiana Hoosiers have dealt with an existential crisis that seems to reach a crescendo at the end of every coaching cycle. Mike Davis replaced Knight, won 46 games in his first two seasons and, in 2002, won the Big Ten and reached the NCAA tournament title game. But he was gone four years later, having never finished a season with fewer than 12 losses.

Kelvin Sampson was never, and we all know how that ended. He put the Hoosiers in a hole that Tom Crean took four years to dig out of, and despite winning a pair of Big Ten titles, he was gone by 2017. That’s when Archie Miller took over. He only last four seasons because an under-.500 record for the Hoosiers’ hand. Now the man in charge is an alum, one that hadn’t been in the college game since Coach K has been at Duke.

There are some differences here. Knight, cruelly stubborn to the point that it led to his downfall, never adapted as the game changed around him. When he left, he napalmed every bridge he could. He’s a God in Indiana, and he was actively working against the Hoosiers. That’s not easy to overcome, and through it all, the question surrounding Indiana basketball has been, ‘Is this still a great program? Is Indiana still a blueblood?’

Coach K is not Bob Knight.

But he also doesn’t have a Roy Williams in his coaching tree. It took six years and a Matt Doherty disaster for North Carolina to find a replacement that could live up to Dean Smith’s standards, but they eventually did. They pulled Roy out of Kansas, which — along with Kentucky — are the two college basketball programs that have proven to be too big to fail, that have shown that they can withstand whatever the sport has to throw their way, that can thrive regardless of who is at the helm (assuming it’s not Billy Clyde Gillespie) and have done so since college basketball first became a thing.

That’s the question we all have with Duke, and with Scheyer.

Is Scheyer the coach-in-waiting because he’s the best man for the job, because he’s the one person capable of keeping Duke, Duke?

Or is he now the coach-in-waiting because he just happened to be the man with the associate head coach title when Coach K called it quits, because when this decision was being made, Steve Wojciechowski was out of a job, Chris Collins is no longer winning, Johnny Dawkins has been mediocre at UCF and Stanford and the shine has worn off of Tommy Amaker’s start at Harvard?

Put another way, is Scheyer the right hire, or just in the right place at the right time to get hired?

I don’t think any one can possibly know until we actually see the results.

But I will say this: Coach K’s ego boost isn’t going to come from being celebrated by Clemson or Pitt.

It will come when his program is the one that can survive. It will come when Duke stays Duke when Scheyer finally gets the reins.

The best way to make that happen?

By spending the next 10 months integrating Scheyer into the role, by allowing his protege to tap into the most valuable resource at his disposal: Coach K himself.

That’s how Duke stays Duke.