Mike Krzyzewski is preparing to leave Duke.
I’m not sure whose sources had it first (certainly not mine), but the announcement is expected soon, if it hasn’t come already: Coach K is going to retire at the end of this coming season. Jon Scheyer is the favorite to replace him.
Krzyzewski is not the best college basketball coach of all time. He’s not the best men’s college basketball coach of all time. But he’s among the handful of names in both those discussions, and while Geno Auriemma and John Wooden have him thoroughly beat (trying to get ahead of this because of the onslaught of best-ever propaganda we’ll be hearing throughout the next ten months), he is certainly a great, great coach. A highly successful coach. Possibly a cheater, but they’re all possibly cheaters, and annoying as he might be, he won a lot of basketball games and a lot of people like him.
As you may have ascertained, I’m not a big Coach K fan. I wouldn’t call myself a hater of his—he’s better than his detractors want him to be, worse than his supporters wish—but I don’t love the guy. I am not the one to talk about the arc of his career and what he means to the sport and all that. Others will happily do that and do it better than I, on both sides of the Coach K divide.
What I’m curious about is what this means for Duke.
Duke’s men’s basketball program was solid enough before Coach K came to town. They made the Final Four three times in the 60’s. They made the Final Four once in the 70’s and the NIT Final Four once that decade too, back when only one team per conference could make the NCAA Tournament.
But a little while after Coach K came to town, things changed. In Krzyzewski’s fourth year, the team began making the tournament every single year, a streak that really just took two breaks—once in the early 90’s and once this past spring, when they declined an NIT invitation. In 1980, Duke was a basketball school the same way Wake Forest is a basketball school—they’d had some success at times and played in a prominent sphere within the sport. Today, they’re a basketball school the way the New York Yankees are a baseball team. They have the most resources. They have the biggest brand. They are one of the most prestigious programs in the sport, arguably the most prestigious program in the sport.
But so, of course, were Indiana, and UConn, and UCLA. And while none of those three is irrelevant (UCLA just made the Final Four), none of them is exactly thriving. UConn played for a few years in a non-power conference and did not by any stretch dominate it. Indiana has failed to make the NCAA Tournament since 2016, and last made the Elite Eight almost two decades ago. UCLA memorably failed to hire their first…how many was it, five?…choices for head coach.
Rome teaches us that all empires fall. Duke’s will be no different. The question is whether this is the era in which it’s over. And the fact that Duke already enters this fall on its heels after the second-worst season since Coach K started doing well underscores the possibility the answer to that question is, indeed, yes.
