reclegend22;976349 wrote:
Where this assumption misses the mark is that, as Laley alluded to, Duke wasn’t the Duke we know today before Mike Krzyzewski. He had to rebuild a struggling program from the court up to turn Duke into the premier basketball school in the country that it is today. Krzyzewski has created and developed such an iconic brand at Duke under his watch that many kids come to play for him because of his legend. I'm not so sure any of the other coaches you mention, despite being damn fine coaches, have been able to create that same type of aura and prestige surrounding their brand.
Duke certainly wasn’t lacking in basketball history when Krzyzewski arrived in Durham. Eddie Cameron, a basketball and football coach and athletics administrator at Duke for over 50 years and the man for whom Cameron Indoor Stadium is named, is the founding father of the Atlantic Coast Conference. The Blue Devils appeared in three Final Fours in the 1960s under the helm of Cameron's successor, ACC legend Vic Bubas, and were the nation’s runner-up with Bill Foster at the reigns in 1978. Lore cloaks the basketball program nestled inside this university’s gothic walls. It is a top five all-time program, one of the royal families of the game. Duke is still Duke, in the same vein that North Carolina is still North Carolina, but Coach K took it to another planet in terms of sustained excellence.
Why Coach K has won 903 games. Consistency. At the highest level.
In terms of pure domination of a conference, Krzyzewski's run in the ACC since 1999 is one of the greatest the college game has ever known. The Blue Devils have won the conference's tournament championship in 10 out of the past 13 seasons. At three wins apiece, those 10 title runs in addition to the three other ACC Tournament championships that he had won in '86, '88 and '92 have given Krzyzewski 39 victories to add to his record career total of wins. Those two handful's worth of ACC titles won by Krzyzewski since 1999 are as many as the number of ACC titles won by any other school in the history of the conference outside of North Carolina (which has won 18).
He has reached the NCAA Tournament in every season as a coach since 1984. That’s a record 27 straight trips to the Big Dance. And in those 27 appearances, Krzyzewski has won more games than anyone in the history of the profession. He is 79-23 in the NCAAs, good enough for an all-time best winning percentage of .775. Jim Boeheim, by comparison, since he was mentioned, has only 41 career victories in the tournament and has missed it entirely four times since 1997. The next closest active coach to Krzyzewski is Roy Williams with 53. Even if Coach K were to walk away from his post today, and never coach in another game again, for the 61-year-old Williams to pass that mark before he turned 68, Williams would need to win the NCAA championship six consecutive years and then advance to the Sweet 16 in the seventh. And that's if Krzyzewski never coached another game as long as he lived. Remarkable. If Krzyzewski coaches another decade like many close to the Duke program think he very well might, it is likely that his final NCAA tournament wins record will never be touched. Reasonably, one could speculate that final NCAA total being somewhere in the range of 100 wins.
Krzyzewski has coached in 11 Final Fours -- the second-most ever behind only John Wooden's 12 -- and has advanced to the national championship game in eight of them. The four national titles Krzyzewski's teams have achieved give the man known simply as K 12 career wins at the Final Four and a championship for Duke in three different decades. A legacy of consistency unparalleled in the modern era.
If you think Roy Williams, Bill Self, Jim Calhoun and Jim Boeheim would have all enjoyed that same string of success had one of them been given the keys to Duke Basketball in 1980 instead of Coach K, maybe you're right. There's no real way of knowing. But I wouldn't bet the program on it.
Correct.
