SAN ANTONIO (AP) — The camera sneaked up behind Jon Scheyer as he started the long walk into the Alamodome's cavernous center, a route that crossed a sea of black carpet and eventually required stairs onto college basketball's grand stage.
“It's the best,” the Duke coach said as looked back over his left shoulder, pointing with the manila folder carrying his practice plans toward the Final Four court.
Scheyer knows a thing or two about this moment. He was the senior scoring leader for a Duke title-winner that made a similar walk in 2010. An assistant who did it twice under Hall of Fame coach Mike Krzyzewski. But this week is a first: Now he's the head coach, the successor who keeps bucking a long-held axiom that you never want to be the guy who follows a legend.
No, Duke is still thriving. Only now, it's unquestionably the 37-year-old Scheyer's blueblood program.
“It's special,” Scheyer said Thursday. “You feel a great deal of responsibility to be the head coach at Duke. You want for your players to be able to experience this.”
Duke's new eraIn many ways, it feels decidedly unremarkable that Duke (35-3) is back in the Final Four. It's a place the program has been 18 times to rank among the sport's all-time leaders, as well as being one of only six programs — UCLA, Kentucky, UConn, Indiana and rival North Carolina are the others — with at least five NCAA championships.
And yet, so much has changed since Duke's run to its last national title in 2015 or its most recent Final Four three years ago. Krzyzewski is gone, retired in 2022 after winning 1,202 games to set a men's college basketball record along with winning five titles and reaching 13 Final Fours.
And Scheyer has won big and quickly, including becoming the first coast to win two Atlantic Coast Conference Tournament titles in his first three seasons and reaching last year's NCAA Elite Eight. Now he's got the Blue Devils back in the national semifinals, with a date against Houston looming Saturday in an all-chalk finale to March Madness with four 1-seeds.
“I’ll tell you how good Jon Scheyer has been,” Houston coach Kelvin Sampson said. “Nobody talks about him replacing Coach K anymore. He’s Jon Scheyer. He’s got his team in the Final Four. I think that speaks volumes for him.”
The handoffScheyer was an assistant in those last two Final Four trips, for the ’15 title and the 2022 trek to New Orleans as the coach-in-waiting — a designation coming months before Krzyzewski began his farewell-tour season. That run ended with a loss to North Carolina in the semifinals, the final horn in the Superdome completing Krzyzewski's handoff to Scheyer.
And it's worked.
“He’s executing the succession just absolutely perfectly,” athletic director Nina King said, backed by the evidence of under her feet: a confetti-covered court after Duke won the ACC title last month.
Associate head coach Chris Carrawell believed in Scheyer, too, partly the product of working alongside him under Krzyzewski. But he also pointed back to the COVID-19 pandemic, when the two lived close to one another and would meet ...
