There is no guarantee that the assistant to a legendary coach will be able to emulate their mentor once they have their own programs. That is certainly the case for the disciples of Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski.
Coach K’s coaching tree features 15 former assistants who have gone on to become college head coaches. As a group, they have a record of 2834–2412, good for a win percentage of 54%. On Saturday night, Krzyzewski’s direct successor, Jon Scheyer, became the first of his assistants to reach a Final Four with Duke’s 82–62 win over Alabama.
Mike Brey had a strong tenure at Notre Dame, where he led the Fighting Irish to a pair of Elite Eights, and Quin Snyder was a solid coach at Missouri (where he became the only non-Scheyer or Brey former Coach K assistant to reach an Elite Eight), and has had more success in the NBA. Given that record, it is hard to judge other programs for being wary of hiring Scheyer before he landed the Duke gig. He was down the road with a pair of notable programs in 2021, before Krzyzewski and Duke opted to make him the coach-in-waiting that summer ahead of Coach K’s final season.
Scheyer told CBS Sports that he was in the mix for the jobs at both DePaul, a Big East program in Chicago, near his hometown of Northbrook, Ill., and UNLV, a tradition-rich mid-major in the booming sports city of Las Vegas. Scheyer said he and his wife were both excited about the Runnin’ Rebels job, and admitted, “I thought I was going to be the coach at DePaul.”
He did not, however, believe there was a chance that he’d become the next head coach at his alma mater.
“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.
Of course, Duke is in the absolute top tier of college basketball jobs, and there’s no guarantee he’d have the same success in Chicago or Las Vegas. Still, it has to be hard for fans of those two programs to look back at the 2021 coaching cycle.
DePaul opted for Oregon assistant Toby Stubblefield, who went just 28–54 with a 9–38 conference record and was fired midway through 2023–24, his third season with the program. He is now back with the Ducks as an assistant. UNLV elevated assistant Kevin Kruger after coach T. J. Otzelberger left for Iowa State. He fared better than Stubblefield, going 75–54 (40–34) but only had an NIT quarterfinals appearance in 2024 to show for his four-year run. UNLV fired Kruger on March 15, replacing him with former Memphis and Georgia Tech coach Josh Pastner.
Meanwhile, Scheyer has Duke absolutely locked in heading into the Final Four. The Blue Devils won the ACC tournament despite missing superstar forward Cooper Flagg for virtually the entire run and have won their first four NCAA tournament games against Mount St. Mary’s, Baylor, Arizona and Alabama by an average of 23.5 points.
Duke will face fellow No. 1 seed Houston in a heavyweight showdown on Saturday, April 5.
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