INDIANAPOLIS — Arizona fans would undoubtedly prefer that their first Final Four in 25 years was not happening under a cloud of uncertainty about the future of their coach, Tommy Lloyd. 

But the North Carolina job is open. His contract negotiations with Arizona are ongoing. And Lloyd is leveraging this unique moment for absolutely everything it’s worth.

That much was made clear Tuesday afternoon at his news conference when, despite the best efforts of the reporters in attendance, Lloyd once again refused to offer anything that would be considered reassuring to Arizona fans — or, more importantly, administrators — about his intentions after the season ends.

“People are going to speculate all they want,” Lloyd said. “Guys, this team has my full focus. Nothing, nothing, I promise you nothing is knocking me off that path. You guys might call them distractions because you’re distracted. That doesn’t mean I’m distracted or we’re distracted. You know what’s pretty cool? Once you get some experience in this deal and you’re a player or coach who’s been at it awhile, you get pretty good at eliminating distractions. So I think I’m pretty good at that and I can’t wait to get to practice today.”

It’s not difficult to see what’s going on here.

Lloyd is — rightly so — a top target for North Carolina, which fired Hubert Davis. The 51-year-old from Kelso, Washington, waited a long time to take on his first head coaching job after 20 years as Mark Few’s top assistant at Gonzaga, and he has absolutely crushed the opportunity with a 148-35 record and Final Four breakthrough in his fifth season. Among the current crop of college coaches, either Lloyd or Michigan’s Dusty May would be the slam dunk of all slam dunks for a North Carolina program that is finally ready to give the job to someone “outside the family.” 

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Just as importantly, he is also considered somewhat moveable despite his general happiness in Tucson and the potential for Arizona to dominate the West Coast. And this, it seems, is where the standoff lies: How committed is Arizona, a school and athletic department that has gone through significant financial challenges in recent years, to investing in that dominance? 

Or, to put a finer point on it, what exactly does Lloyd want? He seems to understand that this is the moment to get it.

“That’s what I feel like my No. 1 responsibility is, to fight to protect the program and fight to build it for those who came before me and for those that are going to follow after me, because you know what, Arizona is going to have another good coach after me,” Lloyd said Saturday after the Wildcats’ Elite Eight win over Purdue. “I promise you. The place is special.”

Talking about a future theoretical successor shortly after the greatest moment of your career was an eye-catching choice, to be sure, but perhaps more of the focus should go toward the first part of the quote about fighting to protect the program. We are in an era where coaching careers, in many ways, hinge on the resources schools give a coach through revenue sharing and NIL to go build a roster. Since the pay-for-play era began, those numbers have not once gone down.

The message from Lloyd is unambiguous: I need more. And never has there been a more perfect vessel to deploy in negotiations than interest from arguably the top basketball job in the country. And rarely has there been a weaker negotiating position than the one Arizona’s administration is in right now with an athletic director in Desireé Reed-Francois who was hired two years ago to fix the department’s budget issues and has had, sources told Yahoo Sports, a sometimes rocky relationship with her basketball coach over his expectations for funding the program. 

Lloyd has played this game before. In fact, he did it last just year — albeit under different, much quieter circumstances. After Arizona’s exit from the Sweet 16, according to sources, Villanova came after Lloyd hard. He was probably closer to taking that job than most people realized before signing a five-year contract extension last April. Though the details are somewhat opaque, it is believed that Lloyd left money on the table — both for himself and in player acquisition — to stay at Arizona. 

It's hard to see that happening again.

We can only speculate about where Lloyd truly wants to spend his prime coaching years. What’s undeniable is that he’ll never have a better opportunity to set up the rest of his career to win national titles — either at Arizona or a North Carolina that will be desperate to get back in the mix after the last five mediocre seasons. 

Lloyd has no bad options here, and he’s playing it to the hilt — just as he should. 

That makes things uncomfortable for Arizona fans, who wanted an unmistakeable signal that he’s staying. It does not appear they’re going to get it. 

But if you’re Lloyd, why do anything at this point to tamp down the pressure on Reed-Francois and school president Suresh Garimella? Why undercut your own negotiating position? 

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A lot of coaches would feel uncomfortable taking a team to the Final Four under these circumstances. Roy Williams often seemed miserable in 2003 when a similar situation was unfolding at North Carolina and he had Kansas in the Final Four. After losing the championship game to Syracuse, he snapped at CBS’ Bonnie Bernstein when she asked the obvious question about North Carolina, saying: “In tough times people should be more sensitive. I could give a [expletive] about North Carolina right now.”

Roughly a week later, Williams returned to his alma mater. 

Lloyd obviously feels comfortable heading to the Final Four with this level of uncertainty hanging publicly over his future, and he’s not straying from the script. But the world has also changed since 2003. 

In the era of an unfettered transfer portal, there is no need for a coach’s loyalty test. Lloyd knows that most of his rotation this year will be in professional basketball next season. As much as they may love what the school has done for them, many of them came to Arizona in the first place because it was the best business decision. Where Lloyd coaches in 2026-27 is of little consequence to what they’re trying to accomplish this weekend at the Final Four. 

Everyone in college basketball these days is on a one-year contract. 

Reed-Francois has said the right things publicly, telling reporters last week that she wants Lloyd to retire as a Wildcat and that they have been engaged in contract negotiations since before the NCAA tournament. She was also brought in to do a difficult job, with the mandate to get back to financial solvency at a place that was running a $39 million deficit. Cutting costs never makes for a popular boss, particularly in college athletics where the ethos has long been to spend your way out of problems and figure out how to pay for it later. 

With NIL and revenue-sharing responsibilities, those days are over at most places. A championship-contending basketball roster is probably going to cost upwards of $10 million, and Arizona is one of a small number of places in the country where filling up the basketball arena is mandatory to make the numbers work. 

But so is North Carolina, which is why the tug of war over Lloyd is going to be tense — and expensive. 

Life is leverage, and the way Lloyd has handled this season — combined with North Carolina’s ability to make a big swing — has put him in position to either take one of the best jobs in basketball or make Arizona one of the best jobs in basketball for a generation. 

That’s the handiwork of a man who knows the meaning of the moment. No matter what happens at the Final Four, Lloyd will have plenty of reason to celebrate. 

CHICAGO — Even back in November, when the nascent college basketball season was barely a ripple on the national sports radar, Michigan and Arizona were eying each other like boxers in opposite corners, waiting for the bell to ring.

Though their paths did not cross, they were practically mirror images, their dominance made obvious by the wins they were racking up against quality teams — often by big margins. As far back as Thanksgiving week, when Michigan polished off the Players Era tournament with a 40-point win over Gonzaga while Arizona had already banked wins over Florida, UConn and UCLA, it would not have been a hot take to suggest they would be on a collision course for the Final Four.

“There were glimpses of this happening,” Michigan athletic director Warde Manuel said Sunday amid the net-cutting celebration at United Center, where the Wolverines had dominated Tennessee, 95-62. “But there was a long season.”

A long season that will end much as it began: With the two teams who flashed the earliest Final Four potential facing each other in the Final Four.

“We always wanted to play against that team,” Michigan forward Yaxel Lendeborg said. “That’s what everybody goes to college basketball for, to play those blockbuster-type games. They got a bunch of NBA guys. We got a bunch of NBA guys. It’s gonna be a fun matchup, man, and I hope everybody’s ready to play because I am.”

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Is it the de facto national championship game? That’s probably unfair. UConn and Illinois, who will be paired in the other semifinal, are excellent teams.

Should the Final Four be reseeded? Now that’s a good debate topic because it certainly appears that the two best teams — and the two best teams all season long — are going to be playing Saturday night rather than Monday. 

How hard is it to be as good as Michigan and Arizona from start to finish? Well, you saw it Sunday when Duke, the overall No. 1 seed, melted down in the second half against UConn.

College basketball deciding its champion with a single-elimination, six-round tournament has long been the sport’s blessing and curse. It makes the stakes of every game sky high and creates Cinderella storylines out of nowhere. It also means the national champion is sometimes not the best team but rather the team that got hot at the right time and avoided bad luck or injury. The uniqueness of March Madness has made that tradeoff worthwhile. 

But thanks to Michigan and Arizona making it this far, there will be no such caveats this year. 

Even before conference play began, you could have reasonably watched those two teams shred everyone in sight and conclude they were on a level above everyone else. 

This wire-to-wire trend, however, goes against much of what we’ve learned over the decades about college basketball. Sure, there have been a handful of outlier teams that were locked and loaded from the beginning, but coaches have generally looked at the season as a way to prepare and peak for March.

When a team flashes national championship potential so early the way Michigan did — there was a 10-game stretch in November and December when the Wolverines were beating teams by an average of 34.5 points, including some true quality opponents — it’s almost problematic. 

“The most difficult part is that everyone starts getting so much more attention, advice — literally everything they get more of,” Michigan coach Dusty May said. “And it’s difficult not to make it about you because the people you’re talking to are making it about you. There’s just a lot of distracting information, and if you’re not mature and you’re not connected to this group and not willing to be held accountable by the staff and each other, then it’s not going to work. 

“And once it creeps in, it’s almost impossible to weed it out. So our guys never let it in. And trust me, they all had different fires that were ignited.”

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If you lump this tournament in with last year, where all four No. 1 seeds made it to the Final Four, it seems like we may be moving away from an era of parity in college basketball and toward a cluster of superpowers. Michigan won its four games tournament games by an average of 22.5 points, while Arizona’s margin was 20.5. Neither faced a true second half challenge on their way to winning their regional. 

Tennessee was a top-15 team in the predictive metrics and not some overachieving mid-major, but it was almost comical how overmatched the Vols looked trying to generate decent offense against this Michigan squad. 

“Some teams have a little more room for error than others,” Tennessee coach Rick Barnes said.

In a way, college basketball and college football have switched roles in the NIL era. Whereas there used to be no parity at all in college football because of how stacked the superpowers like Alabama and Georgia used to be, conference commissioners are now talking about expanding the playoff beyond 12 because we might be leaving out viable teams.

Meanwhile, March Madness has played out pretty true-to-form for two straight years. 

It’s hard to know exactly what to make of that. You can point to the transfer portal and the ability for a program like Michigan to go get an established star like the 23-year-old Lendeborg out of UAB, but here’s Arizona with three freshmen in its starting lineup. Perhaps there’s something to the idea that teams like Michigan and Arizona, which play big frontcourt lineups and don’t rely on making a bunch of 3-pointers to win, aren’t as susceptible to being upset. 

Still, college basketball programs are judged by what happens in March. And we have decades of history telling us that it’s extremely hard, and rare, for two teams to be on a collision course all season and actually end up playing each other in the Final Four. 

“This was obviously one of the goals because of the talent we had,” May said. “We have a sign in our locker room — “April Habits” — and from Day 1 we’ve challenged these guys to develop championship-level habits that would allow us to win a Big Ten championship and would also allow us to turn the calendar from March until April. Now we put ourselves in position to do that.”

Even though Michigan and Arizona showed four months ago that they were probably on a level above almost everyone else in college basketball, there was no guarantee they’d actually get to settle it on the floor. So many obstacles to overcome and landmines to avoid. 

But they will finally touch gloves next Saturday in Indianapolis. Let’s get ready to rumble.

CHICAGO — Gather ‘round the campfire, y’all, and let deacon Rick Barnes take you on a trip through college basketball history.

The year is 1987. Barnes is a 32-year-old assistant coach at Ohio State. He’s at the old Omni in Atlanta, which happened to be the same NCAA tournament site as Southwest Missouri State, which pulled a big upset over Clemson in the first round and took Kansas to the wire two days later. 

“I saw what I thought was the very best defensive team I’d ever seen,” Barnes recalled.

After the tournament ends, Barnes gets the head coaching job at George Mason. He calls the coach of that team he watched in Atlanta, Charlie Spoonhour, and asks if he can come visit and learn about what he was doing. He comes home with a set of drills that Spoonhour learned at Nebraska from Moe Iba, who of course learned them from his father Henry Iba, whose Oklahoma A&M Aggies won the NCAA championship in 1945 and 1946.

“I don’t think I’ve ever invented anything with this game,” Barnes said Saturday. “But I know that I’ve been a guy that stole a lot of stuff from a lot of coaches. People ask me all the time about how the game has changed. It has. But in some ways, it hasn’t.”

In a basketball life as long as the one Barnes has lived, the story of how he ended up here, with another shot Sunday to make his second Final Four at age 71 when Tennessee plays Michigan, can seem like an exhibit in a museum. From working under Wimp Sanderson and Gary Williams to drills borrowed from Bob Knight and Dean Smith to meeting Tom Izzo 1985 on a recruiting trip in Ohio to coaching an 8-year-old Sean Miller at the Pitt basketball camp in 1977 to coaching Kevin Durant 20 years ago at Texas, there is a through line that reaches back almost to the beginning of the sport and forward into forever. 

From George Mason to Providence to Clemson to Texas and finally his last stop at Tennessee, not much has changed for Barnes. With a tweak here and there, it is largely the same drills, the same principles, the same smothering, in-your-face defensive style that has carried him to the NCAA tournament a remarkable 30 times in a just-as-remarkable 39 years as a head coach.

But here’s what’s different now, on the eve of trying to get the Volunteers to their first Final Four in program history: After carrying a reputation as a March underachiever for much of his career, his third straight Elite Eight at Tennessee is a reminder of how much things can change in this tournament without much else changing at all.

“I made mistakes back then in coaching, probably in this tournament, certainly,” Barnes said in his genteel, western North Carolina twang. “Maybe putting way too much pressure on guys and maybe changing up what we did, probably doing too much as opposed to doing less. But I will never take away from [past teams] because I know how hard they work. And I know that, yeah, we lost some heartbreaking games. I wish we would have won a national championship and all that. All I can tell you is that we stand where we are and keep fighting as long as we can.”

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Tennessee, of course, has a monster challenge in front of it Sunday. Michigan, the No. 1 seed in the Midwest regional, has been the best defensive team analytically in college basketball all season. Among all four Elite Eight games, the Wolverines are the biggest favorite. Tennessee, a No. 6 seed that stumbled into March with four losses in its last six games, was not supposed to be here at all. 

And yet, this matchup is as appetizing as any because you rarely get a moment where someone like Barnes, who has been a towering figure in the sport longer than his current players have been alive, can alter his legacy so much in a mere 40 minutes of basketball. 

“It would mean everything,” Tennessee forward Jaylen Carey said. “We want to break that barrier that held him back for so long.”

Barnes had already been around a long time when T.J. Ford, Brandon Mouton and Royal Ivey brought him to his first Final Four, breaking Texas’ 56-year drought before running into Carmelo Anthony and Syracuse in the semifinals. 

But suddenly, on the heels of that run, he was a coaching superstar just shy of his 50th birthday. With Texas’ resources and an established brand, better recruits started to come: P.J. Tucker, LaMarcus Aldridge, D.J Augustin and, yes, Durant.

Which is also where the narrative around Barnes started to go haywire. Over the next dozen years after his Final Four, his tournament record was 12-11 — including the Durant team losing by 19 points in the second round to Taj Gibson’s and Nick Young’s USC team.

Texas fired him, Tennessee hired him and Barnes kept doing what he does: Coach winning basketball. The tournament record, however, didn’t change much. Though Tennessee got to the Sweet 16 twice in a six-year span — more than acceptable relative to its history — Barnes got knocked out by two No. 11 seeds, a No. 12 seed and a No. 9 seed with teams that were all good enough on paper to go much deeper. 

The criticisms were fair. Barnes, arguably the sport’s consummate gentleman, never pushed back on them. And now, three straight Elite Eights later, he’s not wagging his finger.

“I'm not going to sit here and act like I've tried to figure something out, because I haven't,” he said. “We try to be consistent. As a staff, we try to be same every day.”

Because of what isn’t on his résumé, Barnes is probably not going to be recognized in the same class as Izzo or Rick Pitino or John Calipari, who continue to churn out good teams into their late 60s and 70s. 

But perhaps his career will be a testament to at-bats. If you do this long enough and well enough, year after year, those principles you learned from the Ibas and imparted to generations of future NBA players like Tennessee freshman Nate Ament will eventually lead you where you’re supposed to go. Even if it takes decades. 

That’s a hard concept for younger coaches like Michigan’s 49-year-old Dusty May to grasp. Given the volatility of their jobs and the massive amounts of money they make, most of them cannot envision doing this with the longevity of Barnes and others in his generation.

When I mentioned that to May, his eyes got really big and he shook his head before telling a story about picking the brain of Ryan Alpert, the current Georgia Tech athletic director, who worked with May at Florida Atlantic before becoming Tennessee’s deputy AD. May, who long admired the attention to detail with which Tennessee’s teams went through their pregame warmups, wanted any piece of useful information.

“I actually started drinking kombucha tea because Alpert told me they had a kombucha machine in the locker room,” May said. “If I can coach with the longevity of Coach Barnes, as well as he’s done it, I’ll try to steal any secret sauce. Maybe it’s the kombucha.”

More likely, it’s just the basketball, which will keep Barnes going whether or not Sunday is the long-awaited second Final Four. 

“If you love being in the gym and coaching basketball, why not do it for as long as you can?” Barnes said. “The game has certainly changed, but [our generation] got into it because we love coaching basketball. I know talking to those guys, even today, they still really love the challenge of putting together a group of guys that can play beautiful basketball. It’s easier today than it was back then. You can recruit a guy now for a week and get him: What’s the number? In some ways, it gets easier, but the stakes are higher.

“I know this: You don’t take any of it for granted.”

As college basketball heads toward the Final Four next week, much of the sport’s focus will be on the simmering uncertainty at several of the sport’s blue bloods.

North Carolina’s transition plan from Roy Williams to Hubert Davis went bust. Kansas could be facing just its second coaching search since 1988, caught between cross-pressures to elevate current assistant/former NBA coach/alum Jacque Vaughn or cast a wider net if Bill Self retires. And Kentucky’s discontent after 15 years of John Calipari has put Mark Pope, another alum, on the hot seat headed into next year. 

Meanwhile, four years after the retirement of Mike Krzyzewski, Duke is in its third straight Sweet 16, has won 83.7% of its games under Jon Scheyer and seems poised to continue contending for national titles as far as the eye can see.

Over the history of college sports, few tasks have been more vexing for schools and administrators than keeping things both successful and sane around a prominent program once their forever coach leaves. 

Duke has made it look easy. It might even be the most well-executed coaching handoff there’s ever been from legend to successor. 

“The following of one of the very best coaches of any sport, arguably one of the very best basketball coaches in the history of the game, to a young, up-and-coming assistant coach that was a very good college player, there was a lot of room for that not to work,” ACC commissioner Jim Phillips told Yahoo Sports. “In my experience in college athletics, which is over 30 years, I've not seen a more seamless transition than what's taken place.”

Given what a towering figure Krzyzewski became on his way to 1,202 wins and five national titles across his 42 seasons, it’s remarkable how drama-free the Duke program has been the past four seasons under the 38-year-old Scheyer. 

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While the last two seasons have met rough endings — an upset in the 2024 Elite Eight to NC State and a last-minute collapse in the Final Four against Houston 12 months ago — Scheyer has earned enough benefit of the doubt with three ACC tournament titles and an unrivaled recruiting operation to quiet the noise that typically consumes young coaches who have to learn on the job in high-profile environments.  

“You’re always on edge because you know sitting in that chair, replacing that person, the expectations are so high it’s hard to have a good night of sleep,” said UNLV coach Josh Pastner, who took over for John Calipari at Memphis when he was just 31 years old. “It’s like having success is a relief because you have to meet a certain bar. You’re always looking over your shoulder. It’s on your mind 24/7, 365, knowing that’s what you’re being compared to and as human beings, one of our great enemies is comparison to others. It’s hard to disassociate yourself from that. It takes a lot of discipline because the fan base and your bosses are comparing.”

Taking over for a legend

Even though he made four straight NCAA tournaments, the heat of failing to make the second weekend ultimately chased Pastner to Georgia Tech, which is more typical of what happens when a legend leaves and someone else has to deal with unrealistic expectations. 

Just consider: 

• After John Wooden retired, UCLA cycled through five coaches over the next 13 years. 

• Jim Calhoun’s successor, Kevin Ollie, won a shocking national title in 2014 but was responsible for the program falling apart amidst poor performance and NCAA violations.

• There was plenty of drama around Bill Guthridge, Dean Smith’s handpicked successor, who stepped down after three seasons. 

• After Bob Knight’s firing at Indiana, Mike Davis (and several subsequent coaches) had to deal with the drama of being caught between his backward-looking loyalists and those focused on the future. 

• And in more recent vintage, the three years since Jim Boehiem’s retirement have been a disaster for Syracuse, with Adrian Autry fired after going 49-48 with no postseason appearances.  

Jim Livengood, who was Arizona’s athletic director when Lute Olson retired in right before the 2008-09 season amid health ongoing issues, said the year leading up to the announcement followed by a season-long coaching search was among the most difficult situations he had to manage in his career. 

Not only was Livengood dealing with the bizarre circumstance of assistant coach Mike Dunlap refusing to serve as interim coach because he wasn’t offered the full-time job, Russ Pennell ended up leading Arizona to the Sweet 16. Meanwhile, Livengood was trying to pursue some of the biggest names in the profession and felt significant pressure to hire someone who would both excite the fan base and be acceptable to stakeholders who were wary of a significant pivot away from the Olson era. 

He ended up prying Sean Miller out of Xavier, which was considered a big coup for Arizona at the time. Miller made three elite Eights and two Sweet 16s in his first eight years before the FBI inquiry into college basketball and subsequent NCAA investigation derailed the program yet again. 

“I was told by my colleagues probably three or four years prior to Lute getting ill that the transition of who’s going to be that next coach would be the hardest thing in the world,” said Livengood. “And it was really hard. There were so many conversations, so many things nobody understood or knew about. There were people in all different camps. Like the Duke situation, [the result] had everything to do with the person coming in. I don’t think they could have done it if [Krzyzewski] hadn’t been so insistent that Jon be the guy.”

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Why Duke’s plan worked

Duke’s succession plan was nothing if not well laid-out. In January 2021, longtime Duke athletic director Kevin White announced his plan to retire. Four months later, his chief operating officer Nina King was elevated to athletic director. Two weeks after that, Krzyzewski made public that 2021-22 would be his final season, concurrent with an announcement that Scheyer, who had been on staff for seven seasons, would be the head coach-in-waiting and take over the following year. 

At the time, there were critics who felt Krzyzewski’s farewell tour was self-serving. In reality, it was part of an orchestrated sequence of events intended to give both King and Scheyer the best possible chance of a clean handoff while having time to adjust to new roles. And Duke has succeeded where others failed for three reasons. 

The first is resources. Krzyzewski’s retirement took place at the beginning of the NIL era and Duke jumped in with both feet, hiring former Nike and NBA marketing executive Rachel Baker as general manager in June 2022 (long before most programs were doing it). Part of that role was helping organize NIL opportunities, which helped Scheyer get ahead of the game in recruiting right away with the nation’s top-ranked recruiting class.

If anything, NIL taking hold right as Scheyer got the job played to his benefit. Without that infrastructure, it would have been much more difficult to land a steady stream of Dereck Livelys, Cooper Flaggs and Kon Knueppels without having a track record as head coach. 

“Everybody talks about athletics being the front porch of the university but Duke is one of the few that really gets it,” one rival ACC administrator told Yahoo Sports. “They understand what the brand means to the school and weren’t going to let it decline.” 

The second factor is Krzyzewski himself. Though he continued his weekly radio show after retirement and does sporadic media appearances, he is mostly in the background, highly aware of what his presence means and always careful not to overshadow his successor. Krzyzewski rarely attends games but is always available when needed.

“Coach K has given me amazing room to be myself,” Scheyer said at last year’s Final Four. “Really the only advice he gave me from the beginning was to be true to me, to be true to myself. I already knew that. But for him to remind me of that from time to time has been important. I think he understands when he's around just the gravity and the people looking at him and all that. But we've gotten to a point, one, our communication has been the same all the time. I'll tell you for me, in the toughest moments that I've had as a head coach my first three years, the person that I call is him.”

And the third factor is that Scheyer has proven to be a highly effective coach. No matter how much talent he has amassed thanks to the Duke brand and NIL organization, going 69-6 over the past two seasons does not happen by accident. He has given cynics no reason to question his ability to organize the program, manage players or trade X-for-O with more experienced coaches.

“Jon Scheyer is clearly a generational talent who was mentored by perhaps the very best coach ever in any sport,” White told Yahoo Sports. “Pretty darn good recipe for high-end success.”

Legends do not always leave a disaster in their wake. Bud Wilkinson’s retirement at Oklahoma opened the door for another seminal figure to follow in Barry Switzer. Though there were some turbulent moments after Adolph Rupp was pushed into retirement, Joe B. Hall won a national title in 1978 amidst a long run of success. And despite the significant pain and hard feelings between Bobby Bowden and Florida State when the school finally forced him out, the coach-in-waiting plan with Jimbo Fisher was ultimately validated when he won a national title in 2013. 

But in the entire history of college sports, it’s hard to find a situation with blowup potential that was navigated as well as this one. All Scheyer needs is a national title — and it’s probably just a matter of time at this point. 

“I think it’s a credit to everybody involved,” Phillips said. “It’s a credit to Coach K knowing he was getting ready to retire and preparing Jon. There was a strategy behind it, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to work out. The person who deserves the most credit is Jon Scheyer. To understand the assignment and be incredibly comfortable with who he is and understand that he was not going to be Mike Krzyzewski 2.0 takes incredible maturity.”