The Duke Blue Devils lost in the Sweet 16 of the NCAA tournament this year, which to them is always a disappointment. Duke, which won the national championship just last year, is always expected to be in the Final Four with a chance to cut down the nets.
The Blue Devils have a great shot of doing that next year as they should return the majority of this year's roster and they are bringing in one of the top recruiting classes in the nation. Mike Krzyzewski is the big name that everybody talks about in terms of recruiting, but lead assistant Jeff Capel is the behind the scenes guy who is a master recruiter.
Duke may be in danger of losing Capel next season as Georgia Tech has reportedly made him the lead candidate for its head coaching position. Georgia Tech recently fired Brian Gregory after he had five mostly unsuccessful seasons with the team where he finished with a record of 76-86. Athletic director Mike Bobinski is expected to meet with Capel this week and he is also expected to offer him the job.
It is unclear if Capel would be willing to accept the deal, but this isn't the first time since he has been at Duke that he has been offered a head coaching position. Last offseason Arizona State offered Capel their head coaching position but he declined. At that time Coach K said that he was thrilled to have Capel back and it was huge for the Duke basketball program. Krzyzewski is a big proponent of his assistants getting head coaching jobs elsewhere, though, and he remains confident that Capel will find a really good job at some point.
There has been some thought in the past that Capel would stay at Duke, his alma mater, until Krzyzewski retired so that he could take over. The issue with that is Krzyzewski doesn't seem to be anywhere close to retiring so Capel may look to go elsewhere to get back into head coaching. Capel does have experience as a head coach as he was at the helm at VCU for four years before taking over at Oklahoma in 2006.
Capel would definitely be a great get for a Georgia Tech basketball program that hasn't been to the NCAA tournament since 2010. It is just a question of whether Capel wants to go to another school in the same conference as Duke to a team that will be rebuilding. The Yellow Jackets will be losing their top four scorers next season and although they have a pretty good recruiting class coming in for 2016 it will still be a difficult turnaround.
