The true test of any empire is not the size it reaches at its peak but its ability to survive and endure as the world around it changes. No college basketball coach or program has successfully navigated the swirling waters of the sport the way Duke has under Mike Krzyzewski for more than 40 years, and the transition from a legend to his chosen successor is a new and novel challenge.
What's interesting about Krzyzewski handing over the keys to Jon Scheyer is not the one-year internship his former point guard will undertake during the old coach's farewell tour. It's that Krzyzewski has been carefully planning for this moment for more than two decades.
Wednesday's announcement and Thursday's press conference may have come relatively suddenly. The thinking behind it did not.
"Don't try to compare it to any other succession plan," Krzyzewski said Thursday. "This is ours. And we've got the people in place to get it done."
As far back as 1999, Krzyzewski was already building something designed to outlast him.
That's when Krzyzewski conceived and launched the Legacy Fund to raise funds not for Duke athletics in general but specifically for the men's basketball program. A $1 million minimum donation was required, with a goal of fully endowing not only basketball scholarships and coaching positions, but creating a capital fund for Cameron Indoor Stadium.
Creating the Legacy Fund for men's basketball
The name said it all then, and it says it all now.
"That's exactly why we called it the Legacy Fund," St. John's athletic director Mike Cragg, for many years Krzyzewski's consigliere at Duke, said in an interview Thursday. "We went through a lot of brainstorming and ideas of what to call it and how to do it. It was very intentional from the start that it was about creating a fund and relationships and a network that helped best ensure the long-term sustainability of success. It really, truly goes back 21 years."
That shouldn't come as a surprise. Over the course of his time at Duke, arriving as a 33-year-old and sticking around long enough to coach his own grandson, Krzyzewski managed to adapt to changes in recruiting, officiating, even new generations of players with different attitudes and priorities in a manner many of his colleagues and competitors were either unable or unwilling to attempt.
His toughest adaptation was the one he had to undertake of himself, from the obsessive pre-1995 ways that allowed the job to consume him to his post-1995 balance, not to mention the more executive leadership that saw him emerge as a thought leader not only at Duke — where he came to outrank his supposed superiors — but across college athletics and beyond.
There's a lesson in that: Krzyzewski's personal approach to coaching was not sustainable. He had to find a way to make it work without the same kind of all-encompassing emotional and physical investment, and he did. In the wake of 1995, he and Cragg started laying the same kind of groundwork for the program itself: what it would look like after Krzyzewski, whenever that was.
That included planning for immediate, tangible improvements, like the dedicated practice facility that opened next to Cameron in 2008 — the eponymous Michael W. Krzyzewski Center — but also more ephemeral goals, with less determined timelines. Like any ACC athletic department, Duke already had a robust fundraising apparatus, the Iron Dukes. The Legacy Fund was, and remains, focused exclusively on Krzyzewski's program.
Involvement of Coach K's former players, family
Grant Hill, Christian Laettner and Brian Davis have all made public gifts over the years, but the family has been deeply involved as well. Krzyzewski himself endowed a scholarship in the name of his older brother. Krzyzewski's daughter Debbie Savarino has worked with the fund since 2004 and overseen it since 2015. According to her official Duke bio, it now has 47 members and has raised more than $115 million.
Duke doesn't make a big deal about it; it's barely mentioned in the Iron Dukes fundraising brochure and occasionally pops up in oblique references elsewhere. (Kevin Marchetti, a former team manager who joined Krzyzewski and assistant coach Nolan Smith in a $225,000 food-bank donation during the pandemic, was noted as a "Legacy Fund member" without explanation in a Duke press release.)
But money is power in college sports, and Krzyzewski not only ensured that Duke basketball will remain a financial powerhouse after he's moved on to his new role as a campus ambassador, but he will remain in a position to substantially influence the direction of the program if he so desires.
That's no accident. Krzyzewski has been planning for this moment for a long time.
"I don't want everything to end when I stop coaching," Krzyzewski said. "I want it to continue."
Handing off to Jon Scheyer
Krzyzewski built Duke basketball into what it is today. And while he was doing that, he tried to build it into something that could still survive and thrive without his presence on the bench.
"A lot of money was raised, but more importantly a network and infrastructure to support the basketball program," Cragg said. "It will certainly serve Jon and the program well going forward. It's actually something Jon Scheyer and I have talked about as well, a really important part of thinking forward that Coach K did a long, long time ago."
That doesn't guarantee Scheyer will pick up where his mentor left off in the fall of 2022 — no institution can weather the departure of such a singular force of personality without some turbulence — but it does mean the program has been consciously constructed on a foundation that doesn't necessarily include Krzyzewski.
By his own design.
