Those who were around for the early part of the Krzyzewski era will remember that for a while, it was a real uphill struggle. UNC was by far the most dominant ACC program, Maryland was reliably a Top 10 to 15 team, Georgia Tech was surging, and NC State won a national championship in 1983 (following a Tar Heel title in 1982).<\/p>\n
The \u201890s were when Duke became an elite program, rather than simply a bunch of nice guys who consistently overachieved, but who didn\u2019t win titles.<\/p>\n
There are elements of Duke\u2019s rise that you\u2019ve seen, but a lot of it you may not have put together as well as this article does. It\u2019s really an interesting perspective.<\/p>\n
Although Coach K was the visionary, one man who doesn\u2019t get enough credit for what happened in Durham is Quin Snyder.<\/p>\n
When Snyder was a Duke assistant, he was, in a sense, the second coming of Vic Bubas.<\/p>\n
When he was the Blue Devil\u2019s head coach, Bubas completely redefined recruiting nationwide. He approached it systematically, identifying talent across the country at a much younger age than anyone else. For instance, Bubas nearly had Art Heyman (New York), Jeff Mullins (Lexington, Kentucky), and Bill Bradley (Crystal City, Missouri) on the same roster.<\/p>\n
At or about the same time, he was gathering information on Jack Marin, Bob Verga, and Mike Lewis. Dean Smith once said, \u201cVic taught us all how to recruit.\u201d<\/p>\n
Snyder did something quite similar by applying business principles to a basketball program. Prior to his innovations, nearly every program ran more or less as a mom and pop shop.<\/p>\n
Interestingly, Jon Scheyer, who has done a lot to modernize the program in just a few short years, is perhaps the third figure in this Duke tradition of innovation.<\/p>\n
Anyway, this is a really interesting read. It is paywalled, but the average 12-year-old can figure that out in 1-2 minutes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Those who were around for the early part of the Krzyzewski era will remember that for a while,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":763784,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[574],"tags":[64,63,726,7432,85],"class_list":["post-763783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-basketball","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-basketball","tag-main","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=763783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/763783\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/763784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=763783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=763783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=763783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}