Duke Recruiting: Well Now, What’s This?

Well this is interesting: According to reporter Nick Brazzoni, a reporter who we don’t know much about, Patrick Baldwin Sr. may be on the way out at Milwaukee, which would change things a good bit for Patrick Jr.

We wouldn’t wish many guys to lose their jobs and certainly have no reason to wish for Baldwin to lose his. However, his record at Milwaukee is 47-70 which admittedly isn’t great, but two years of that was affected to some extent by Covid, and if you can him, obviously you lose the best recruit your school is ever likely to get.

So if true, that’s a considerable monkey wrench in young Baldwin’s plans. Before you get all excited, a couple of points to note:

1. He hasn’t lost his job yet.
2. No one should pull for him to lose his job so Duke might benefit. That would be cruel and indecent.
3. Even if Sr. gets fired, there’s no guarantee Jr. will choose Duke.
4. There’s always the Larry Brown/Ed Manning ploy: if Baldwin Sr. were suddenly unemployed, we could see someone, logically Northwestern’s Chris Collins, hiring him. Both coach Baldwin and his wife are graduates and Patrick Jr. is on record as loving the school.

So this is a very interesting tweet but there’s a lot of moving pieces still.