What Now?

No one is going to argue that how Duke played in Raleigh was acceptable. Jeremy Roach didn’t. Kyle Filipowski didn’t. Jon Scheyer certainly didn’t.

No one was happy.

A lot of people are going to look at this game and think, well, that would never have happened under Coach K!

But it did, and with a certain regularity. Not to say that Mike Krzyzewski’s teams took beatdowns on the regular, but they did happen and it would be silly to argue they didn’t.

For his part, Coach K used them as testing material and while he detested losing, he always said that failure was valuable. Those games were a chance to confront his team with raw, unadulterated truth that helped them to improve.

As for Scheyer, we just don’t know everything yet. He’s been far more genial than the blunt Krzyzewski but at times like this, the coach, any coach, can’t afford to be like that with his team (and we have minimal insights so far into how he interacts with his team).

People generally recognize Scheyer’s coaching acumen but we haven’t really seen how he deals with a tough stretch. We’re sure that he knows a lot more about what happened and what needs to be done to keep it from happening again.

As for the rest of us, we’ve told you several times since Scheyer took the job that there it wasn’t all going to be, in Al McGuire’s memorable phrase, seashells and balloons.

For fans, the important thing is to support him and his staff. So as we have often done, we want to ask everyone to avoid going on social media and just ripping on him. It might help you feel better or get more followers, but it won’t help him and it probably won’t help his team.

Your team. Our team.

Whatever.

People talk about the transition like it’s over. It won’t be over until Scheyer fully grows into his job. It’s going to take more than 15 games to do that So please: try to be constructive fans and remember that no matter how bad things may look, it’s far, far better than anyone of us could do.

He still needs time to grow into his job.

So next play.