At Duke, we want to move away from the “one-and-done” strategy

NCAA – Recipe of the Blue Devils over the past decade, the “one-and-done” system is no longer as successful as it once was.

Charles Darwin suggested as early as 1859 with his theory of evolution: in an increasingly competitive environment governed by natural selection, the human species, throughout its existence, continues to evolve.

Applied to the thorny subject of the “one-and-done” in the NCAA, this analogy embodies in any case rather well the reality of the situation of Duke Today. The NCAA landscape has never been so upset, between the emergence of the NIL which encourages the best players to stay on campus for several seasons, and the probable future abolition of the age limit set at 19 for the NBA draft.

This last point is also the most important element of Duke’s strategy in the years to come: whoever says end of the age limit for high school students, says the possibility for them to join the NBA directly, and therefore to zap the NCAA box. In other words: the “one-and-done” scheme, a pillar of Duke’s success since the early 2010s, will become more and more obsolete in the years to come, and the Blue Devils will then have to adapt.

Successor to Mike Krzyzewski, Jon Scheyer understood it well. Former player of the program which he is now at the head, the 35-year-old technician is the youngest head coach of the “Power 6” (the six major conferences of the NCAA first division: ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Big East, SEC and Pac-12), and its youth and modernism will be invaluable to best enter this new era university championship complex.

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« I am satisfied with our current situation and our performance on the sporting level, but in the future, in my opinion, it will be more essential to ensure continuity in our ranks, from season to season. he said this week about it. ” From a program culture perspective, even if it’s hard to maintain in the world of college basketball. But we feel we can do it, just by recruiting a little differently. I don’t think that in the future we will recruit so many freshmen.

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Certainly a real 180 degree turn, therefore, for this program accustomed to seeing first-year players parade every year for more than a decade. This season again, the Blue Devils have seven “freshmen” in their ranks, including three expected in the 2023 Draft in June (Dariq Whitehead, Kyle Filipowski and Derek Lively II).

More broadly, since 2013, Duke has produced 20 “one-and-dones”, the second largest total over the period behind Kentucky, the other “factory” at “one-and-dones”.

« It’s a question of sustainability adds Jon Scheyer. ” That’s the current state of things in college basketball, not just with Duke. »

The figures actually prove him right, since while Duke continues, season after season, to bet on extreme youth, the national champions have succeeded each other for almost seven years with a common characteristic: their great experience.

Villanova in 2016 and 2018, North Carolina in 2017, Virginia in 2019, Baylor in 2021 and Kansas last year all effectively won the title with “old guys” in their squads. The figures are there too without appeal: only Virginia and Kansas have won by appearing outside the Top 100 of the oldest teams in the first division (107th and 128th respectively).

« It’s a founding year this season for us, the first of a new project concludes Jon Scheyer. ” Our goal, despite everything, will never be to become the oldest team on the circuit, we will always have freshmen in our rotations. But the idea is to strike a balance.«