Jon Scheyer has been the perfect successor to Mike Krzyzewski and is having one of the best first three seasons of a head coaching career ever. Scheyer has gone 81-19 through three regular seasons, brought home two ACC Tournament Championships, and now is taking Duke to the Final Four for the first time as head coach in his third season at the helm.
Scheyer is beloved around Durham and it's been remarkable how good of a job he's done, especially when it comes to succeeding potentially the greatest coach in the history of the sport. However, all of this almost never happened, as Scheyer was chasing other head coaching jobs while he was still an assistant for Coach K.
CBS Sports college basketball insider Matt Norlander talked with Scheyer about the point in time when Scheyer thought he was on the verge of leaving Durham for a head coaching job. Scheyer had now been an assistant at Duke for seven years and was ready for his next challenge.
Scheyer is a Chicago native, and felt great after interviewing for the DePaul head coaching vacancy in 2021. It was also now publicly revealed by Norlander that Scheyer interviewed for the UNLV head coaching job, and he was expecting at least one of them to go his way.
"It got crazy the last couple weeks," Scheyer said. "I thought I was going to be the head coach at DePaul."
Instead, both schools turned him down, and Scheyer remained on Coach K's staff.
But just a few months later, Coach K said that Scheyer would be the one to succeed him in 2022. Scheyer told Norlander how he didn't even think that was a possibility a few months before, and then couldn't "fathom" being anywhere else.
"Duke wasn't even an option or a reality then, and to think, you miss out on those, and then two months later, you can't, you can't even fathom it."
Coach Scheyer has truly done an impeccable job with the Duke program since he took over for Coach K in 2022 and now has a chance to lead the program to its sixth national championship in program history and his first as Blue Devils head coach. But it's wild to think just how different of a direction Duke basketball could be in right now if things went the way Scheyer expected and he took over at DePaul or UNLV instead.