Duke University athletics holds itself to a very high standard and the natural part of collegiate athletics is movement among head coaches from school to school and job to job.
For the longest time many deemed it unfair that coaches could pick up and leave whenever they wanted to, but players were theoretically stuck at the school they picked until the creation and popularization of the transfer portal.
However, none of that currently applies to the state of Blue Devil athletics.
Within the last 19 months, Duke has seen its head football coach, Mike Elko, bolt for Texas A&M after two very successful seasons in Durham and its baseball coach, Chris Pollard,left for the head coaching job at Virginia less than 24 hours after the Blue Devils lost Game 3 of the Super Regional on its home field to a No. 4 seed.
It was easy to see the reasons why Elko left for College Station. He had ties to the Aggies, being the team’s defensive coordinator before coming to Duke, and the money an SEC program can offer a head coach, including the state-of-the-art facilities and resources, do not compare to that of the Blue Devils.
However, Pollard’s departure should be an alarm sounding in the office of Duke athletic director Nina King.
Why would a coach who has brought Duke baseball to heights it has never seen before jump at another job in the same conference? Is it money? Facilities? Funding? Revenue?
It probably has to do with a little bit of everything, but it makes Duke feel like more of a steppingstone job rather than a destination – outside of men’s basketball.
The biggest sports the school has to offer are men’s and women’s basketball, football, baseball, and men’s lacrosse and the only head coach you can confidently say will remain in his position, unless he wants to try coaching in the NBA, is Jon Scheyer.
Duke is one of the best jobs in all of college basketball. It has everything a program could want and more, but the same clearly ca not be said for the other sports.
Elko and Pollard already left and John Danowski, the legendary men’s lacrosse coach, is much closer to retirement at this stage of his career than anything else.
So, what does it mean for the future of Duke athletic?
At this point it seems possible for women’s basketball head coach Kara Lawson to leave for a major job opening if someone came calling with enough money as women’s sports are continuing to evolve and develop into serious revenue generating sports and would anybody be surprised if Manny Diaz were to listen to another school if the Duke football program puts together another surprisingly successful year?
There is a lot on the plate of a college athletic director in 2025 but Nina King has to take a long look at the inside workings of the Duke athletics department and figure out a way to keep some of these highly successful coaches in Durham for the long haul.