Duke basketball: Top five reasons for Coach K’s sudden recruiting slump
By Matt Giles
Explanations for Duke basketball recruiting drought: STRATEGIC OFFER TOTAL
3. STRATEGIC OFFER TOTAL
Early on in his career at Duke, Mike Krzyzewski adopted the strategy of pinpointing a handful of recruits from each class who would fit his system and then prioritizing his selections by making them the only offer recipients. Needless to say, this tactic has worked out just fine for the NCAA’s all-time wins leader.
The easiest way to show how Coach K generally differs from most of his peers at other powerhouses in this regard is to compare his 2020 offer sheet to that of North Carolina head coach Roy Williams.
Each landed six commits and ended up with one of the three best classes in the nation. But they went about it in dissimilar manners. Williams handed out 18 offers in total to 2020 prospects, per 247Sports. Krzyzewski, meanwhile, needed only 11; doing the math, that means his success rate was 55 percent, which is astounding when considering all the targets were top 55 prospects.
All in all, though, as a result of Duke’s way of doing things, quiet spells with no big recruiting news come about more often than at other places, sometimes generating the guise of some failure or shortcoming that doesn’t actually exist (see: the topic of this article). This next reason aligns with the same thinking…