On the day before what turned out to be the final game of his 47-year head-coaching career, Mike Krzyzewski wanted to make something clear. His thoughts shifted from the task at hand, and his Duke team’s challenge of playing against North Carolina in the Final Four, to the state of the sport in which he’d spent a lifetime, and college athletics as a whole.
“I don’t know if I’ll ever get a chance to talk to all of you again,” Krzyzewski said early last April, addressing dozens of reporters in the bowels of the Caesar’s Superdome in New Orleans. The day before that, he’d criticized NCAA President Mark Emmert without directly naming him, and he’d chided the NCAA for what Krzyzewski characterized as a lack of vision.
“Where are we going?” Krzyzewski asked, broadly speaking to the myriad questions that suddenly surrounded college athletics. “... What are we doing?” He added that he had “many questions” for Emmert, and that “it’s a new day” in college sports “that should’ve been a new day decades ago. So we’ve got a lot to make up for.”
