Duke's Jon Scheyer faces an impossible task

As of this past Saturday, we have officially entered the Jon Scheyer era in Duke basketball. A first-time head coach, hand-picked by Mike Krzyzewski as his successor, Scheyer has been rising the ranks as an assistant coach with the Blue Devils since 2013.

To go out on top, maintaining a good relationship with the school you’re leaving, apparently allows you some say in how a program that you have built ought to continue. While Scheyer has no previous head coaching experience, is it safe to trust Coach K’s wisdom one last time in doing what is best for Duke basketball — a decision he has had to make countless times over the last four decades?

As Duke heads into their first great unknown of this century with Scheyer, we take a look back at other college coaches who were put in the impossible position of succeeding a legend in the sport — some of whom stepped up from longtime assistant roles, as Scheyer will do, and others who had previous head coaching experience elsewhere, as Roy Williams did. Each had enormous shoes to fill, and did so to varying degrees of success.

Scheyer has, at least, been given the benefit of a sort of training-wheels year during the controversial Coach K retirement tour — many of the coaches on this list were just as surprised as the rest of us to hear that their boss would be retiring.

Wooden dropped one of the most shocking retirement announcements of all time in 1975, when his Bruins team won their NCAA semifinal game and he said that he’d be retiring after the championship game, win or lose. They won, and he was one of the few coaches truly able to go out on top.

His successor was Gene Bartow, who had a remarkably successful tenure at UCLA with a 52-9 record over two seasons. But he left by choice after only two years to help UAB build an athletic program (he said in a letter later in life that he left because UAB offered him three times his UCLA salary).

It would certainly be a stretch to say that Knight left IU on good terms with the administration, but he was still a widely beloved figure when he was fired from his 29-year tenure with the Hoosiers in 2000. Assistant coach Mike Davis, at first an interim, took the reins from Knight and led IU to a 21-13 record the year after Knight was removed.

The following season, Davis took the Hoosiers all the way to the NCAA Championship game with a roster that included eight players from Knight’s time as head coach. But as Davis found himself floating further out from Knight’s influence on the program, the team went downhill, and he ended up resigning in 2006.

After 26 seasons and three national championships at UConn, Calhoun hand-picked his successor in former player and assistant coach Kevin Ollie in 2012. In Ollie’s second year as head coach, he led the Huskies to yet another national championship — but, as the pattern has gone, the program took a nosedive in the years after. In his six seasons as HC, the Huskies only made the NCAA Tournament twice, and Ollie ended up getting fired for NCAA violations after several bad seasons.

Summit was an unmatchable force during her 38 years as the head coach of the Tennessee Lady Vols. Racking up over one thousand wins and never missing an NCAA tournament, Summit had to step down from her role in 2012 due to a diagnosis of early-onset dementia, and was succeeded by Warlick, who had been working under Summit for nearly three decades.

While her first few seasons were success stories, with SEC regular season and tournament titles and Elite Eight appearances not uncommon, the shadow that Summit cast soon faded, and after three seasons of mediocre conference play and disappointing tournament results, Warlick was fired in 2019.

Just as Dean Smith had groomed Williams for the UNC job, Williams mentored former Tar Heel Hubert Davis for a decade before the three-time championship-winning coach decided to retire. Though the program hadn’t lived up to its sky-high expectations during Williams’ last few years on the job, he was less than five years out from his last national championship when he retired.

Despite a very shaky start to the regular season for Davis that left fans questioning whether he was the right guy for the job, his first-year squad beat Duke twice in clutch performances, including in the Final Four, and made the national championship game. But as we’ve seen with so many of these, first-year success isn’t necessarily an indicator of how well coaches do going forward, but more of a reflection of the program that the previous coach built and left behind.

Williams’ last successor, Bill Self, coached the Kansas team that beat the Tar Heels this weekend. There’s a post-legend success story for you.