How about this for an interesting bomb that Seth Davis dropped at the end of his column on SI.com yesterday:• You may recall that when Mike Krzyzewski 
was sidelined with exhaustion following his back surgery in 1995, the losses Duke suffered were charged not to Coach K's record but that of his assistant, Pete Gaudet. (Gaudet learned of the switch by reading about it in USA Today.) When asked by a reporter about that last week, Coach K replied, "I think I should have been credited with all the losses." He's right, and hopefully Duke will now do the right thing and officially correct the record both internally and with the NCAA.
Coach K's back surgery and subsequent voiding of his coaching record for half a season with the worst Duke team of his tenure has long been a joke amongst the Duke hating crowd (aka - 99% of college basketball fans). When you look at all the circumstances surrounding the event with Gaudet being the $19,000 a year assistant who took the losses and then was pushed out of the program the following offseason (he's now the video coordinator for Ohio State's women's team), it's always looked suspicious at best. Add in the fact that Eddie Sutton received credit for "wins" while his son was in charge on interim basis and several other occasions where coaches received the credit for the performances of their teams when they were medically unavailable, and Davis is right - Duke needs to do the right thing and wipe the record of that team from off of Gaudet's record and restore it where it rightly belongs, on Coach K.
Comments (Page 1 of 1)
I'm surprised the back pain didn't resurface after the recent four losses Duke suffered. Coach K is a fraud.
More Duke hating from people who have no idea what was going on. Read the man's book. His wife was going to leave him if he didnt take the time off and recover like three doctors told him he needed to. Why should those losses be on him? He wasnt coaching and the next year he went back to the NCAA with practically the same team. A fraud? Only a true idiot would try and discredit what Coach K has done in his career. He already has more National and ACC Championships that the "great" Dean Smith. He has had far more Player of The Years than Smith. By the end of his career he will be the winningest coach of all time. Coach K is the best coach in the country. Period.
I didn't grow up in this country, never played basketball but love college basketball and I love Duke and Coach K. If the past policy in theis situation is that you charge the losses to the head coach, then I think it should be done. It would be the honorable thing to correct the statistics and I hope Coach K leads the way to do that. He has an outstanding career and that wouldn't take away from it...
Hey Samuel, I'd agree with you and say that Coach K's record speaks for itself... but his record is in dispute. Only an megalomaniac would get his record revised to omit a bad season then throw is $19K/yr assistant under the bus. K is truly setting a precedent here, but you've gotta love how, eleven years after the fact, K is willing to accept credit for the '95 record. So why hasn't Duke updated K's record after K's tireless efforts to correct the record over eleven years? What is a great leader, who happens to be a great coach, to do? He may just have to put his foot down and refuse to let Duke name any more buildings or centers after him until Duke corrects his record.
Yeah, K has won a lot of games. But if that's your only criterion for greatness, you're as delusional as K. Ask anyone in the Carolina family if he thinks Dean is great. Now ask William Avery or Eric Meek what they think of K. And did Dean Smith appoint himself the official spokesperson for ethics and leadership? Really, any comparison is just sad. But if you are fixated on wins, let's look at Dean's & K's head-to-head record. Dean was 26-14 (actually 28-14) against K. And if you think that record was front-loaded with wins early in K's career, consider that Dean was 7-1 in his last 8 games vs. K.
Now if the reason K sat out in '95 was to appease his wife, I can't blame him. She has a mouth like a sailor -- I wouldn't cross her either. You'd never expect such vitriol and bad language to come from one person's (other than K's) mouth.