Bad news to the many, many Duke-basketball haters out there: It appears that you’re going to have to put up with the Blue Devils in all of their punchable smugness, with their fade haircuts and the skinny blue letters on their swelling chests, their floor-smacking defense and their clean, net-twitching shots, for at least another day, if not another generation.
Four years after Jon Scheyer took over as head coach from the legendary Mike Krzyzewski, his record is a wonder: At just 38, he has reached 100 wins faster than any other coach in Atlantic Coast Conference history, and for the second year in a row, he has the NCAA tournament’s top-seeded team—if a shaky, young one. His 42–2 mark against conference rivals in the past two seasons is so dominant that when North Carolina finally got a win this season, fans stormed the court—in February. “He’s done a magnificent job,” Krzyzewski told me this week. He added that a number of times, “I’ve said, ‘You’ve done that better than I would have if I stayed on.’”
Succession is among the most difficult passages for any organization, but especially so for sports teams headed by coaches who become monuments. By all rights, when Krzyzewski retired in 2022, after 47 seasons, as the winningest man in the history of the NCAA Division I, Duke should have been done as a brand, more dead than Sears. The life should have been drained out of its student body, that feral organism that the NBC announcer Al McGuire once 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 still hunting for a dynastic replacement for the 10-time NCAA champion John Wooden; the team has won just one title since he stepped down in 1975. His successor, Gene Bartow, quit after two years, so immediately tired 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 said at a press conference soon after he was hired. “You want to be the guy who follows the guy who follows the guy.”
[Read: The end of niche college sports]
Krzyzewski spent years thinking through his succession plan—not only how to execute a transition without ego or tension, but also what sort of temperament would be required in the team’s next leader. “Not many coaches truly want the program to succeed once they’re done,” Scheyer said. Even fewer take the trouble to go on an extended hunt for the right personality. Of all Krzyzewski’s achievements, his successful fostering of Scheyer may qualify as a “masterstroke,” the former Duke player turned ESPN announcer Jay Bilas told me. Some of Scheyer’s bench acumen was on display in the first round of the NCAA tournament yesterday, when he rallied his predominantly freshmen team from a 13-point deficit to survive an upset bid by the 16th-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 kind of nerve for Krzyzewski to back a guy who had never been a head coach before and whose lead quality is self-deprecation. A bland-seeming sort, Scheyer lacks the overt superciliousness and elite carriage associated with other Dukies, such as JJ Redick, who in 2024 became 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 said last week—after winning his third ACC title in four years and finishing the regular season with the top ranking in the country.
Krzyzewski had tension with Duke officials over choosing Scheyer. According to Krzyzewski’s biographer, Ian O’Connor, the university preferred other Krzyzewski apprentices, such as Tommy Amaker, who had done the impossible and made Harvard competitive, and Johnny Dawkins, who was building something at the University of Central Florida. Krzyzewski has loved few players the way he loves Amaker and Dawkins, guards who led his first Final Four team in 1986. But he was absolutely convinced that the right successor was already in the seat next to him on the bench: Scheyer, who’d served as his assistant for eight years, had a combination of strategic insight and floor perception that set him an inch apart. “He’s one of the smartest coaches in the country,” Krzyzewski said on the day the succession plan was announced. “Nobody knows that as well as I do.”
Krzyzewski has known Scheyer since he was 16. He first recruited Scheyer as a high schooler out of the Chicago suburb of Northbrook, Illinois, where Scheyer was a skinny but stealthy playmaker, a dead-eyed shooter, and a ferocious competitor known as “the Jewish Michael Jordan.” In one notable performance, he scored 52 points, 21 of those in just 75 seconds, in a frantic effort to rally his team during a tournament game. According to Bilas, Scheyer is, quietly, “as competitive as any player” who’s ever been at Duke. His wife, Marcelle, once told Sports Illustrated that she refuses to play even Monopoly with him.
From 2006 to 2010, Scheyer competed in a boiling-oil environment in which the Blue Devils were so loathed by anyone not a Dukie that at lunch counters, he worried about cooks spitting in his food. A North Carolina fan in an apron would joke, “Hey, I’m gonna mess with your sandwich,” Scheyer said at the time. “And they are joking, I think. But honestly, it makes me want to watch my food being made, to make sure.” Some players struggled with the constant jeering hatred and performance pressure—Redick went into a depression—but Scheyer seemed imperturbable. When asked by a reporter who would inherit the mantle of “most hated Dukie,” Scheyer responded, “I would hope myself.” Krzyzewski recognized that inside the mundane-looking kid was an incurable gamesman who didn’t just cope well with pressure—he liked it.
Krzyzewski summoned Scheyer back to Duke as an assistant in 2013. Scheyer had suffered a freak eye injury in NBA summer-league play that destroyed his chances of making a club, and after brief stints playing overseas in Israel and Spain, he was trolling for a job. He contemplated apprenticing at Northwestern under Chris Collins, a former Blue Devils coach and player, but then Krzyzewski called and upbraided him for even thinking about going anyplace but Duke. According to Scheyer, Krzyzewski’s sell went like this: “Don’t be an idiot. Come back here.”
[Read: My year as a degenerate gambler]
Krzyzewski had a long-standing preference for filling assistant-coaching seats with his former players. It’s clear now that this wasn’t just favoritism and Dukian self-regard. It became part of his plan. “I knew one of these guys was going to take my place,” Krzyzewski told me. “So they were constantly being trained to do that.” He tended to hire guys like Scheyer, former guards who understood the action across the whole floor, who had been team captains, who had an affinity for responsibility. Krzyzewski distributed equal workloads to his coaches regardless of age or experience, all of them collaborating in scouting and game planning, and promotions came regularly as senior coaches cycled out of the program and got their own head jobs. “I told them right from the start, ‘You’re not coming here to be an assistant,’” Krzyzewski told me. “‘I want you to be thinking as a head coach every day.’” It took Scheyer just five years to earn the title of associate head coach. By 2021, a dozen of Krzyzewski’s former assistants would be serving as collegiate head coaches, and four made this year’s NCAA tournament.
Krzyzewski coached one last season, 2021–22, with Scheyer by his side for a year of tutelage. At the time, it was a controversial move, one that seemed to invite all kinds of potential conflict and emotional messes. Critics charged that Krzyzewski was a holier-than-thou hypocrite who just wanted a farewell ego tour and couldn’t let go. As it happened, Krzyzewski’s closing season finished on a note of triumph as he reached one last Final Four, and Scheyer considered the year he spent as the designated-in-waiting an indispensable experience. It “made it more real for me,” he said later. Daily, he and Krzyzewski talked through decisions: What’s going on in his mind? Why did Krzyzewski call a time-out when he did? How to shake a player out of his nerves? “The conversations we had behind closed doors,” Scheyer said, “were some of the most impactful I’ve ever had with him.”
When Krzyzewski turned the program over to Scheyer, he gave him the greatest gift he could, apart from the job itself: He publicly disappeared. He did not attend a Duke game in person for two years, though Scheyer said they remained “close as can be.” By fading from view, Scheyer said, Krzyzewski gave him “amazing room to be myself.”
Among Scheyer’s most significant departures from his predecessor: He has sought a broader mix for his coaching staff, hiring from outside the “family” of former Duke players that Krzyzewski tended to favor. He has also installed an offensive scheme that is noticeably faster-paced than Krzyzewski’s. He is a different sideline presence than the profane, glaringly intense Krzyzewski, but a presence nonetheless—a cool cat who is all poise.
Scheyer did have some moments of self-doubt during the transition. “You’re not completely sure if everything you’re doing is right,” Krzyzewski said. “But just about everything he did was right.”
If so, give Krzyzewski partial credit. He was right that Scheyer’s youth—he is the youngest head coach in the ACC by about a decade—was not a drawback but a strength. With the game undergoing rapid change due to the new personal-branding rights for student athletes, introduced in 2021, a new head coach needed to be as current as possible, and not nostalgic, according to Krzyzewski. Scheyer’s adaptability has proved vital: Despite NCAA rules changes in each of his first four years, he has brought in elite recruiting classes, with successive Player of the Year candidates in Cooper Flagg last year and now Cam Boozer, a projected NBA top pick.
Scheyer does share some qualities with his former boss. They’re both “anal preparers,” Krzyzewski told me. And they both view strategy as secondary to the ability to reach players emotionally in a big moment. If you can’t feel the game “during the moment it’s going on,” Krzyzewski said, “you should be a TV analyst.”
Which is not to say that all of Scheyer’s feelings have been victorious. In the Final Four last year, Duke collapsed, losing a six-point lead to Houston in the game’s final 35 seconds. “I’m sure there’s a lot more that I could have done to help our guys at the end there,” Scheyer said at the time. “That’s the thing that kills me.”
But any hope Duke rivals had that the dynasty might fizzle was short-lived. Scheyer is so resourceful and his team this season is so deeply talented that even when it lost two starters, Caleb Foster and Patrick Ngongba II, to foot injuries, it defended its ACC tournament title to secure the NCAA tournament’s top seed—despite having just a seven-man rotation that includes four freshmen and a sophomore. He remained without both Foster and Ngongba in the scare with Siena. Just ahead of that game, Scheyer reflected that even though the Duke job comes with pressure and the possibility 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 year is loaded with upset-minded opponents, including 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, anything less than a championship will undoubtedly invite restlessness from fans and disparagement from rivals. That’s simply how a succession narrative goes. But whatever happens during the tournament, Scheyer has made his team a spring perennial again. Maybe your grandkids will inherit a March Madness without Duke.
The post Bad News: Duke Is Still Pretty Good at Basketball appeared first on The Atlantic.
