Opinion: Duke's Jon Scheyer faces unique pressure with top prospect Cooper Flagg on team

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Jon Scheyer, the 37-year-old coach of college basketball’s most scrutinized program, has recently found a mutual sounding board in Marcus Freeman, the 38-year-old coach of college football’s most scrutinized program.

In all of sports, there may be no one who understands what Scheyer has gone through in his first two years leading Duke more than Freeman. And the same is true going the other direction, as the man who replaced Mike Krzyzewski is the rare person who can at least imagine the burden of being a first-time head coach at Notre Dame of all places.

“Very few people can have the empathy for what that feels like,” Scheyer said. “We’ve shared some moments with that.”

Always competing against history. Always being compared to ghosts. Always having to meet a standard that seems a bit unfair, even if it’s what they have signed up for.

Scheyer has won 75% of his games, an ACC tournament championship and reached an Elite Eight over his first two seasons at Duke. By almost any definition, they are results that should have ended any questions about whether he was too young, too inexperienced, too nice to handle the enormity of his job.

And yet, the questions will persist — especially for the next six months. Especially with the best prospect in the world on his roster.

Though Scheyer has had the sport’s best collection of high school recruits from Day 1 of his tenure, he has never experienced anything as a head coach quite like the conversation that will take place around Duke the moment 17-year-old Cooper Flagg walks onto the floor.

Scheyer has seen something similar as a player and assistant. Duke, in a way, is uniquely set up to handle the hoopla that accompanies the bluest of blue-chip recruits because it has done it so many times from Brandon Ingram to Jayson Tatum to Zion Williamson to Paolo Banchero.

But the Flagg experience promises to be something different. He’s not just the consensus No. 1 pick in the 2025 NBA draft; he’s already got a highlight reel from scrimmaging the U.S. Olympic team this summer where he more than held his own against established NBA stars.

And he’s white, which is notable because of the cultural conversation that will surround Duke whether it likes it or not.

It could be a bit of a circus.

For Scheyer, though, it’s inevitably going to be a referendum: How much talent does he need to get it done in March?

I asked Scheyer at the ACC’s preseason media event here on Wednesday whether Duke had a template for handling the microscope that comes with a prospect like Flagg because of how many times it has done it over the years. He pointed to the "hot and cold world we live in” and the need to stay emotionally even-keeled no matter the chatter that takes place after a good or bad performance.

But in reality, it’s not Flagg who will be subjected to the roller coaster of hot takes this season. It’s Scheyer.

“That's part of the territory, right?” Scheyer said, before revealing how closely he had been tracking with Freeman thanks to a mutual friend who had introduced them. “I've admired what he's done because you go from beating Texas A&M and you're the best coach in the world. The next week, you lose to Northern Illinois and all of a sudden you become the worst coach. Then you steady the ship. You just can't go there. There’s no coach you don't go hot and cold with. I think it's just the world we live in. It's nothing personal or whatever.”

It's not personal, but it’s also not entirely unfair.

With Freeman, the inconsistency of Notre Dame's performance and multiple losses to clearly inferior teams has led to questions about whether a genial 30-something who doesn’t look much older than the players on his team can get his team to produce the focus and intensity necessary to play at a high level every week.

And with Scheyer, the simple fact that he does not have the intimidating presence of Coach K after winning five national championships will lead Duke’s fan base into hand-wringing about whether he has the "it" factor any time the Blue Devils fall short of those massive expectations.

These criticisms, of course, play on stereotypes of most young coaches and are based on narratives without a lot of facts behind them. The truth about coaching is that we only see a small slice of the work coaches do. The actual culture of a college program is opaque, built on a thousand decisions and conversations that happen behind the scenes.

So instead we judge the results based on our perception of what they should be. And with Scheyer, there are two legitimate ways to interpret those results.

On on hand, his first two seasons have been successful by most measures, especially given how young his rosters have skewed in an era where older teams are generally more successful.

On the other hand, Scheyer recruited eight five-star prospects and a few other four-stars in his first two seasons and it did not result in dominant teams. In fact, last season ended in the Elite Eight with a gutting loss to NC State when the Blue Devils were the clear favorites to reach the Final Four.

Another interesting trend: Most of those players have not improved their reputations as NBA prospects after playing under Scheyer. Some of those elite recruits have transferred to other schools. The highest any of them were drafted was Dereck Lively at No. 12 overall.

Is that Scheyer’s fault? Were they overrated as high school players? Will they have better success elsewhere?

These are not easy questions to answer, especially given the small sample size, but they do raise the stakes for this season when the clear No. 1 prospect who isn’t in the NBA is wearing a Duke uniform. This needs to go well. It can't just be a breakthrough to a Final Four, either. Scheyer must show top recruits that he can give them what they want on the way to NBA stardom — two concepts that go hand-in-hand under the current Duke model.

That's a kind of pressure maybe only one other person in college sports truly understands.

“My message to our players, and my mindset myself — I don’t go on Twitter because it’s going to do nothing good for me, including somebody saying I’m the best coach in the world. That doesn’t do any good either,” Scheyer said. “Focus on what you can control. Special things can happen when you do that.”

It’s early, but Scheyer hasn’t quite made special things happen yet at Duke. With Flagg now on campus, it would be a good idea to start soon.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Opinion: Duke basketball coach Jon Scheyer must win with Cooper Flagg