NEWARK, N.J. — It was the spring of 2021 and Jon Scheyer was on the precipice of a life-changing job opportunity.
But not the way he expected. Not anything close to what he would become.
We know Scheyer now as the head coach of Duke men’s basketball. It’s hard to see him as anything else; it’s sort of crazy how quickly he’s made that a true statement.
But around four years ago at this very moment, Scheyer was waiting on two job opportunities, practically convinced one of them — if not both — would go his way.
Scheyer, who is a Chicago native, chased the DePaul job. He interviewed there and loved his chances. But that wasn’t the only one he was eying. This has never been publicly revealed until now: Scheyer told CBS Sports he also interviewed at UNLV in 2021. He thought he had a real shot at that one, too. DePaul was intriguing, because of Chicago, but UNLV was the one he and his wife, Marcelle, got really excited about.
He’d been a seven-year assistant at Duke by that point. Helped the program win a national title as a player in 2010 and did it again as one of Mike Krzyzewski’s lieutenants on staff in 2015.
It was time. He thought he was ready. Though still plenty young (in his early 30s), he was desperate to be a head coach.
“It got crazy the last couple weeks,” Scheyer told CBS Sports about that moment in time. “I thought I was going to be the coach at DePaul.”
The school hired Tony Stubblefield instead. Shortly thereafter, UNLV also turned him down, hiring Kevin Kruger. Scheyer was deflated.
Later that spring his life — and Duke’s program — changed forever.
“Duke wasn’t even an option or a reality then, and to think, you miss out on those, and then two months later, you can’t, you can’t even fathom it,” Scheyer said.
He’s telling me the story as a piece of white twine tickles his forehead. It’s tied around the closure of his 2025 Final Four hat, which Scheyer’s wearing backward. He’s leaned against the wall in the back hallways of the Prudential Center. Less than 100 paces away, his team waits for him to return to the locker room for one more celebration before leaving this arena — and preparing to go to San Antonio.
At 37, Scheyer has taken Duke to the Final Four and done so in just his third season on the job. His Duke team throttled Alabama 85-65 on Saturday night in the Elite Eight. What was supposed to be a high-level matchup instead turned into a one-sided Duke rout, the latest in a pile of pulverizations this team has delivered over the past four-plus months.
What could have been a terrific East Regional final between the top-seeded Blue Devils and No. 2 Alabama was instead a laugher. Duke took a 15-5 lead on Bama a little more than four minutes into the game. The Crimson Tide missed 18 of their first 25 shots. Duke was never truly threatened.
A game removed from making an NCAA Tournament-record 25 3-pointers on 51 attempts, Alabama wound up 8-of-32 (25%) from deep. It was playing catchup from the get-go, and in that sense, the game was a bust. The Tide never held a lead and never put together a run. Duke kept Alabama scoreless for more than five minutes in the second half, choking out any hope for a run to make the game interesting.
And so, with a Final Four now official, so is this: We have another Great Duke Team. This one is 35-3 and two wins away from having a claim as one of the best teams in modern history. At KenPom.com, it currently only rates behind the 1998-99 Duke team (that was stunned in the national final against UConn) as the most statistically efficient of the past 28 years.
When Krzyzewski decided in 2021 that Scheyer should be the one to succeed him in 2022, the decision came as something of a surprise. They’d go for nearly a year to handle the transition. Krzyzewski’s farewell tour also received criticism as a result.
“I knew it was going to be hard,” Scheyer said of being given this job. “I think it’s harder than I could have imagined. I think the most important relationship for me was being really connected with Coach K.”
Truth is, ever since Scheyer got the gig he’s made one of the toughest assignments look entry-level in its lack of difficulty. Following a legend is infamously one of the most difficult things to do in sports. Most fail. Some do well enough while still falling plenty short of the standard set by whichever all-time great preceded them.
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“Knew he had it, I knew he was special,” Duke assistant Chris Carrawell told CBS Sports on the court as the team cut down the net. “He’s grown so much this year, so proud of him and what he had to go through. There’s a learning curve because you take over for the greatest coach of all time, and it’s not easy.”
Scheyer sure makes it look easy, though. The 18th Final Four in Duke history happened with one of the strongest four-game struts ever at this blue blood power. Duke is beating teams in this tournament by an average of 23.5 points.
“X’s and O’s, he had that from the beginning, but his leadership has taken over,” Carrawell added. “It’s the hardest thing ever because it’s so much pressure. They criticize everything you do, every move you make.”
Even the most optimistic of Duke fans couldn’t have expected this. Scheyer has made the complicated seem seamless. He does it with a down-to-earth touch that permeates throughout the program. He’s a lot different than Krzyzewski, who burned on a competitive edge that made him legendary — but also not easy to work for. A change in personality was exactly what Duke needed.
Duke never fell off under Scheyer; now it’s two wins away from a sixth national championship.
“It starts with something that any great relationship has, human to human, person to person, coach to player: a relationship starts with honesty,” Cooper Flagg told CBS Sports. “Never hiding anything, telling me what I wanted to hear, but just giving me the truth and nothing but the truth.”
Scheyer was intentional about this roster and how it needed to be built after suffering a huge letdown in the Elite Eight a season ago. He did not waver on his vision. When other schools with freshmen in prominent roles were losing, Scheyer stuck to his philosophy. There were specific players with specific skillsets he coveted. The staff’s list of transfer targets was not long. He brought in guys from Tulane, Purdue and Syracuse — none of them similar, style-wise — to mesh with one of the strongest recruiting classes in Duke history, led by Flagg and flanked by Kon Knueppel and Khaman Maluach.
“That’s what drew me to him in the first place,” Flagg said of Scheyer’s communication skills. “How we built the base of our relationship, and since then, it’s just been easy. I wanted him to coach me as hard as he can.”
Said Knueppel: “Normally, coaches are always kissing your ass. He’s always had super-honest and raw conversations.”
Duke’s defense was tremendous Saturday, holding Alabama more than 26 points under its season average going into the night (91.4), the 65 points amounting to the second-fewest the Tide scored this season. All-American Mark Sears, who in his previous time out sank 10 3-pointers and scored 35 points, didn’t make his first basket until 2:16 remained in the first half. He finished with six points on 12 shots, a brutal finale to an otherwise tremendous college career.
That’s the Duke effect. That’s Scheyer’s doing.
“Cooper would run through a brick wall for that man,” Kelly Flagg, Cooper’s mother, told CBS Sports. “I’m kind of gushing, obviously, but John really is the greatest.”
This team is a machine. It has one of the best one-and-done players ever in Flagg, but also a switchable freak in Maluach who, with a 9-foot-8 standing reach, is a carnival of terror everywhere on the floor.
“What John is about is building a relationship that is built on trust and respect,” Kelly Flagg said. “Cooper is a kid that wants to play for somebody who he trusts and who he respects, and it’s a mutual thing. John doesn’t berate his players. He doesn’t belittle them, but they’re playing for him as well. They love him, and they trust him, and they want to play as hard as they can.”
Duke hasn’t entirely changed the way it does things, but the shift has been noticeable enough that the modernization in the day-to-day has enabled the program to not fall behind. One example among many to choose from: Scheyer hired Rachel Baker, a former Nike associate who was well-regarded in the recruiting space, to be his general manager. He did this before most other programs made space for such a position. She’s been a pillar within the program, just like Carrawell, fellow assistant Emanuel Dildy and many more.
Through it all, Scheyer’s focus has always been about the players, to a level most coaches his senior can’t keep up with. Scheyer admits to being a notoriously bad sleeper. He is never not available for his team. That devotion pays off with guys who will buy in, almost no questions asked, and reap the rewards like what this team’s done.
“He acts like he’s a player,” Knueppel told CBS Sports. “He really understands us, especially with practicing when our body’s maybe not feeling great, he can feel it, he understands that. But also on a level of what it takes to be a player at Duke, and the competitive edge you have to have to be successful. He really embodies that well, and in a way that it’s not overbearing and horrible, like some coaches, but he has his own way of doing that and being a super-good dude.”
Scheyer is overseeing a squad that is barely interested in making games competitive. The best compliment I can give this team is it’s as loaded and deadly as any that played under Coach K. But this is different. It feels different. Duke has become something else.
“We’ve had to pivot as a program,” Scheyer told me. “The timing of it was really the time where you couldn’t do things the same. And so in some ways, it was great timing, and then it made me really be true to who I am, faster.”
He’s been aided by befriending fellow coaches in their 30s: Joe Mazzulla with the Celtics, Will Hardy with the Jazz and Marcus Freeman with Notre Dame. Saturday night was the 89th win of Scheyer’s career, tying him with Brad Stevens and Brad Underwood for the most wins to start a career through the first three seasons. It would be at least 90 now if not for the loss to NC State a year ago in the Elite Eight. That one lingered with him. Bothered him. Duke was the better team, but not on that day. It deserved to lose. Would he have a team, built in his image, with his convictions, deserving of atoning? Most of these players weren’t with the program a year ago. But they all bought in.
Scheyer called Krzyzewski on Friday afternoon, just to touch base and talk about, well, he didn’t want to divulge too much of what the conversation was about. But Scheyer did tell me Krzyzewski told him this: “Don’t take for granted being in the Elite Eight. It’s not easy to get there. When you’re there, you want to take advantage of it.”
Krzyzewski followed up with a text a couple hours before tip-off on Saturday.
“That meant a lot. I’m lucky to still have my coach,” he said of the 78-year-old Krzyzewski. “That’s unique. It wasn’t about the game plan. It was about me and him, which was a special thing.”
Knowing what we do now, it’s clear Krzyzewski’s public succession plan best set up Duke, and Scheyer, to keep the program atop the sport. Seeing Duke throttle Alabama on Saturday night was the last result needed to confirm that the right man, in the right way, was picked for the right job.
Given the weight of the Duke job, this could have gone poorly with almost anyone else. But unlike his previous job interviews, Scheyer didn’t come in second.
DePaul and UNLV have since made other hirings. Scheyer wasn’t available the second time around.
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