American sports fans love to hate Duke men’s basketball program in much the same way that they love to hate the New York Yankees and Notre Dame football. Success brings forth detractors as well as admirers. It polarizes while also establishing a level of competitive excellence that gives rival competitors a target.
Yet, what happens when success stops being as successful as it’s been in the past?
This is one of many inconvenient questions raised by Duke’s fathomable but still surprising loss to the belief-filled Mercer Bears in the NCAA tournament’s round of 64 on Friday. Two years ago, the Lehigh Mountain Hawks beat Duke in Greensboro, N.C., a 15-over-2 upset that Mike Krzyzewski hadn’t previously endured in his majestic career. Now, Duke has absorbed a 14-over-3 upset in Raleigh, N.C. Viewed narrowly, one could look at the past three years and think (wrongly, of course) that the Blue Devils are slipping.
Yet, the question remains: Does this loss change Coach K’s legacy in any meaningful way? The question’s worth asking if only to get college basketball fans to think critically about how coaches and programs should be assessed. The obvious answer to the question is that, no, this loss doesn’t altar in the slightest what Krzyzewski has achieved over the past 30 years.
Where does Coach K fit in basketball’s larger history — college, pro and international? This is the greatest college basketball coach of the present generation, one of a few men who — alongside giants such as Phil Jackson, Gregg Popovich, Larry Brown, Tom Izzo, and Rick Pitino — has raised the bar for basketball coaches. If you prefer to use very specific phrasings and are a stickler for semantics (and are a UCLA partisan as well), fine — it’s reasonable to say that Coach K hasn’t necessarily “raised the bar” relative to John Wooden. He’s merely kept the bar as high as the Wizard of Westwood first established.
What’s the simple yet inconvenient truth about Coach K? He coaches in a sport where 20-year-old male members of the human species take the court under withering pressure. Such a profession lends itself to frailty and failure, especially since there’s no best-of-seven-game safety net to rescue the successful college team that has a bad day at the office in the third or fourth week of March. If you coach long enough in this business, you’re going to lose. It’s instructive to remind you that before John Wooden won just about everything in sight over a 12-season stretch, UCLA’s coach endured 13 — yes, 13 — straight seasons without a Final Four, let alone a national title.
Just let that detail sink in for a bit.
Did you do some thinking? Good.
John Wooden was outclassed by Pete Newell of California (Berkeley) before he became who he became as a coach.
With Mike Krzyzewski, the relentless march of time has created a resume in which the second half of his career has been more barren (though certainly not completely barren) in comparison to the front end of his tenure at Duke. Coach K, from 1986 through 1994 and then from 1997 through 2004, laid the college basketball world at his feet. Over the past 10 seasons, though, the Blue Devils have made only one Final Four.
Is Coach K slipping? The shortsighted answer says yes. The accurate contextual answer is that he’s going through a bad cycle in a sport where bad cycles can, do and will happen, even to the best of them.
Dean Smith didn’t make a Final Four from 1983 through 1990. He made the Sweet 16 in each of those years, but he didn’t play on the final weekend of the season.
At a lower level of stature, extremely accomplished coaches such as Lon Kruger of Oklahoma and Bo Ryan of Wisconsin just can’t seem to make deep NCAA runs with regularity. Tubby Smith couldn’t get past the Elite Eight at Kentucky after his one run to the title in 1998. John Thompson III has won at a high rate in the Big East and has been very good for Georgetown, but his track record in March since 2008 has been awful.
This time of year, you hear and read so much about coaches. Coaching legacies offer a subject I love to write and talk about precisely because it’s so easy to look at one or seven years and conclude that a coach occupies a certain place on the totem pole. It’s fine to engage in these debates, and I’ll even volunteer the admission that I’ve pre-judged coaches in a negative way, only to see them bust through a ceiling a few years later.
The best thing to do with coaches at power programs is to acknowledge the reality that they’re going to suffer the kinds of losses Coach K endured today against Mercer. Having made that acknowledgment, one must then ask, “Has [insert coach here] achieved enough in his career to offset his bad NCAA tournament losses as a higher seed or as a favored team with a chance to make a run?” If the “resume cupboard” is bare, that’s when a more skeptical assessment of a coach is warranted, but if there are substantial countervailing achievements on the dossier, it’s markedly unfair to say that a coach has underachieved.
I always say this about an excellent team or individual athlete when he/she/it suffers an historically unusual defeat: The moments of great frailty magnify the larger career of supreme achievement and constant success. What Duke did from 1986 through 1994 and then from 1997 through 2004 only adds to one’s appreciation of Coach K’s legacy after a loss such as this one… and the 2012 loss to Lehigh.
More will certainly be said on the topic of coaching legacies as the 2014 NCAA Tournament continues.
