Without Coach K and Roy Williams, Duke and UNC head into the basketball unknown, together
There’s never been a transition like this because there’s never been anything like this, two Hall of Fame coaches at two blue-blood basketball programs slugging it out for almost 20 years, then both deciding to exit within weeks of each other and turn their teams over to first-time head coaches.
It’s enough to give anybody whiplash.
For decades, we’ve been able to rely upon one immutable basketball reality, like gravity or sunrise: that Duke and North Carolina -- with the occasional annual exception -- will be among the best, if not the best, teams in the country.
That’s been a source of frustration elsewhere (especially at N.C. State) and a source of pride in the Triangle (but not, especially, at N.C. State), but it’s also been a fact, an absolute, that these two titans of the profession, Mike Krzyzewski and Roy Williams, would ensure the stakes would remain as high as possible in the most famous rivalry in the sport.
Then came these seismic spring weeks that upended everything about basketball we took for granted and ushered in this unfamiliar uncertainty.
Williams is already on the golf course and grandfathering his grandkids. Krzyzewski will join him in the latter in nine months after one last run at a sixth national title. Together, they have won 2,073 (and still counting) college basketball games. Their successors have won 2,072 fewer, and that one not even officially, a stand-in performance by Jon Scheyer last season while Krzyzewski was in COVID-19 quarantine.
Both Hubert Davis at UNC and Scheyer at Duke were groomed for this, amid rampant external speculation in Chapel Hill, more quietly in Durham. In some fundamental ways, they’re as alike at the beginning as Krzyzewski and Williams came to be at the end, when they were political allies in the ACC and basketball-coaching world as much as they were rivals.
Both Davis and Scheyer were cerebral guards who were students of the game as players, both fully committed to their alma maters as assistant coaches, both have shown as recruiters an ability to connect with the next generation of players, both step into the footprints of legends and face the highest of expectations.
Davis coached the JV team at North Carolina just as Williams once did, his in-service preparation for the head job. Scheyer will have this year as coach-in-waiting, entrusted with new visibility and new responsibility during Krzyzewski’s final tour of the ACC.
Failure, for either, is not an option.
For it is not just the fate of their programs alone they hold in their hands. Duke and North Carolina have accounted for 23 of the ACC’s past 29 Final Four appearances and 9 of its past 11 national titles, and departed Maryland accounts for a good chunk of the remainder.
Without Duke and North Carolina the past 35 years, the ACC is basically the AAC.
And while everyone’s attention, especially new commissioner Jim Phillips and the league’s media partners at ESPN, may be focused on football -- which means getting someone, anyone up to Clemson’s level -- because that’s where the money is, basketball is where the ACC’s heart has always been.
The Big East additions bring some history of their own, and some programs have come and gone and even come back again -- Virginia, N.C. State, Georgia Tech -- for the past three-plus decades Duke and North Carolina have consistently shepherded the weak through the valley of basketball darkness.
Now, they are, or about to be, the vulnerable.
Williams isn’t worried. Maybe he should be.
“It will be different,” Williams said. “But Vic Bubas and Dean Smith left and Duke and North Carolina were still pretty good. Roy Williams and Mike Krzyzewski are leaving and it’s still going to be pretty good in this area.”
One would hope, but that’s gone from a given to a gamble.
The idea of simultaneous slippage by both programs has never before been worth considering; it now looms in the distance as a more tangible threat. Suddenly. Pointedly. Threateningly.
This story was originally published June 4, 2021 at 9:51 AM with the headline "Without Coach K and Roy Williams, Duke and UNC head into the basketball unknown, together."
