“I’ve always looked at a game wasn’t over until you analyze that,” Krzyzewski said Thursday, his Duke team in preparation for a mammoth showdown vs. blood rival North Carolina in the Final Four on Saturday. “And we’re able to put a tape together, feedback for your team the next day. And then once that was given, that game was put on the shelf and you move forward, and it’s just a routine of what a game is and then how do you prepare for the for the next one.”
That august image of Coach K flares in contrast with the gritty, quiet reality of what built that image in the first place. At his core, Krzyzewski is a wicked competitor, someone hellbent on dismantling his opponents, a man who has processes, habits and routines that might seem to border on psychopathic for anyone in search of standard work/life balance — or a normal sleep schedule.
“At 75, he still wants to fight everyone this week,” Notre Dame coach Mike Brey, a former Duke assistant, told CBS Sports.
It’s this reason, beyond all others, that Krzyzewski has successfully coached to the age of 75, built up arguably the greatest career in basketball coaching — ever, at any level — and has Duke back in the Final Four. It’s Krzyzewski’s 13th time bringing his program to the biggest stage in college basketball. That’s a record. His record. There’s a healthy chance it’s never broken.
“He’s relentless,” Duke associate head coach Jon Scheyer told CBS Sports. “Like, he’s a machine.”
The following calculation is an approximation, and almost certainly an undershoot. To get a sense of how much time Krzyzewski has lived by reliving his own teams’ games and/or scouting opponents, a conservatively fair estimate is four hours of postgame film review per game (according to former Duke assistants who were interviewed for this story). Add in at least another hour — at LEAST — per game that Krzyzewski watches on his own time, and the number comes out to about 8,000 hours of his life that’s been spent watching tape. Minimally. That equates to 333 full days. In reality, when you stack up all the film sessions together, it’s plausible that at least one full year of Mike Krzyzewski’s 75 voyages around the sun has been dedicated to watching and scouting basketball tape. That doesn’t account for coaching in games, practices, writing practice plans, travel, any of that.
He’s relentless. Like, he’s a machine.
Duke assistant Jon Scheyer
“To me, it’s kind of superhuman,” Chris Collins told CBS Sports. Collins played at Duke from 1992-96, then spent 13 seasons as an assistant before getting the Northwestern job in 2013. “In those kind of film sessions and an interacting with the staff, that where’s I grew to appreciate that burning fire inside of him to compete to win.”
To get a clean understanding of how this 75-year-old has made it one final time to the biggest stage in the sport, there’s probably no better way of crystallizing it than by looking at the man as he’s lived most of his coaching life.
Sitting in a room and watching the tape.
Just a man and his beloved film. A coaching sanctuary.
“If I call him, nine out of 10 times it’s, ‘Oh, I’m just watching tape,’” longtime Duke sports information director Jon Jackson said.
Getting to more than 1,200 career wins, reaching 13 Final Fours, winning five national championships, emerging victorious in more than 100 NCAA Tournament games … these things don’t happen purely on the shoulders of good fortune by coaching great players. Krzyzewski’s a madman for film. True hoops sicko stuff.
“His energy is ridiculous,” former assistant and Duke player Steve Wojciechowski said. “I’ve been really fortunate in my travels to be around what I would consider elite competitors, and I’m not sure anyone’s matched Coach in that category, whether it’s players or other coaches. It’s not just his competitiveness, but his ability to day in, day out execute personally his own values and try to get the people around him to do the same is unfathomable. Unfathomable.”
Krzyzewski adopted the method from his legendary college coach, Bob Knight. At West Point they had a room with no windows – in effect, a bunker. Coaches would sit in the dark, closed off from society. K carried on the tradition when he got the Army job in 1976 and hasn’t changed much since. A game ends and, as soon as possible, he craves to relive what he just coached through. Rewatch the game once, maybe twice, maybe even three times. Move on to scout upcoming opponents. Squeeze it all in as quickly, but methodically, as possible.
“It’s a borderline unhealthy, obsessive nature of how he does this,” Brey said. “It’s going to be like, you want to know why he’s this good? That’s why.”
Every game Krzyzewski coaches, there is an internal dialogue playing along to a movie in his head. He’s keeping track of what is happening in real time, making mental notes, then wants to confirm or negate his impressions and biases after the game. To wait until the morning or the next afternoon is to go against what his brain his telling him to do. He processes and curates the message he wants to tell his team immediately, the next day. There needs to be evidence to what he’s saying. The message is always authentic.
For more than four decades, Krzyzewski’s approach to scouting and game prep has never changed. Getty Images
“I could never imagine how disciplined and how much he works when I got on staff,” Scheyer said. “I knew as a player that he prepares as well as anybody, but you’re not able to visualize that or to see it firsthand. And so when I was going back on staff, I was talking to Wojo and I talked to [Collins], I remember him explaining to me that coaches watch film after every game, and so that doesn’t matter if it’s a 9 o’clock game in Tallahassee or if it’s a road game. And being the low man on the totem pole, or the new guy, because you’re a few rows back in the plane, like, you better stand up and make sure you’re watching and engaged, even if it’s a few rows back.”
Even if Krzyzewski didn’t invent this method of game recap+prep, he damn sure perfected it. It’s distinguishably his. College basketball is filled with coaching junkies who dive into tape plenty, but the number of coaches who can sustain a scouting schedule like K’s over the decades might match the number of coaches who’ve won as many games as he has. Assistants must plan sleep schedules in advance. The day before and day of home games, stealing away for a late-morning or early afternoon nap at home is advisable. Getting home before 2 a.m. after a night game? Usually not happening.
For home games, K had the postgame media obligations, and it’s that point the staff could get in their hellos and goodbyes to friends or family or recruits. But once that is done, it’s time to dig in. Long nights. Big food orders.
“Usually pizza, because K is a big pizza guy,” Collins said.
“They probably have filet and lobster now,” Wojciechowski said. “Could be pizza, eventually it got a little bit healthier, so it was … cheese pizza.”
If Duke played well, the night could be manageable and everyone could be leaving Cameron Indoor Stadium at a reasonable hour. Say, maybe even 1 a.m. And if wasn’t a good night for Duke?
“Well, you were going to be there most of the night,” Collins said. “It was almost like if it did lose a game, he would purposely not sleep because he wanted himself to be as edgy as possible to carry over to his guys the next day. He always created an environment that was very uncomfortable after a loss.”
It’s not as if the assistants were always going through something akin to high school detention. This wasn’t something to dread, even if it was taxing.
“That was his social hour,” Brey said. “If you won, there was nothing like watching that together.”
Watch the game you just lived through, then debrief. Watch another game, or perhaps the same game a second time, then debrief again. And there’s a running dialogue throughout. The assistant in charge of the scout of the next game would bring up the next opponent and go over clips.
“As much as we were working, you have to understand too, being in Durham, the scope, the area is very much UNC country,” Collins said. “He can’t really go to restaurants. In a way, it was really fun when we had big wins, to me, that was a way — we were former players and were family. For him it was a way to decompress. He wins 90% of his games, nine out of 10 those are happy meetings. Just to hang out, have some food, talk about the game and celebrate a game.”
There have been slight modifications over the years, all technological. When a young Jay Bilas got into coaching and joined K’s staff, Krzyzewski was watching reel-to-reel tape of his team’s games, in addition to studying the VHS capture of the television broadcast. He wanted both.
Here’s how it worked in the late ’80s: after home games, Bilas would drive to a house tucked in the woods of Chapel Hill. There was big mailbox cubby built into the front of the house, and Bilas would drop off four canisters with game reels inside. The man who lived there would develop the film overnight. Bilas being stuck with this duty meant he also was the one to pick up the food, since he’d be last to Krzyzewski’s house. Last one to the Krzyzewski residence also meant having…
