Coach K's over-the-top Duke farewell signals fading era of star college basketball coaches | Opinion

Now that it’s out of the way, can we agree to never again do something as silly as what happened at Cameron Indoor Stadium on Saturday night?

Not because the great Mike Krzyzewski didn’t deserve pomp and circumstance in his farewell to the arena he made into college basketball’s premiere venue. Not because of the insane, five-figure ticket prices that were paid to get into the building to mix with former Duke players and celebrities. And not because it was decidedly awkward to watch Krzyzewski and his Duke players re-emerge from the locker room after a 94-81 loss to North Carolina so that he could give a speech he was in no mood to give.

But as college sports embraces a new era where player empowerment and profit rule all, it felt oddly out of place to watch not just a game, but an entire television event built around the mythology of one 75-year-old man. It was the last gasp of a system that is antiquated, unnecessary and obsessed with turning coaches into God-like figures.

This isn’t Krzyzewski’s fault. He’s not only the most important coach in the history of college basketball — yes, even ahead of John Wooden — there will never be another 42-year run at one school like his. When he announced that this would be his last season, it was completely obvious that this, the final regular-season game against North Carolina, would be the moment for tributes and remembrances.

And yet, it all felt a little too much.

Clearly, it was too much for Duke’s players, who started the game nervously and finished it poorly while North Carolina, a double-digit underdog, ran away in the final few minutes. It even seemed a little too much for Krzyzewski, who came back out for the pre-planned programming still steaming, took the microphone and told the crowd, “I’m sorry about this afternoon. It’s unacceptable. Today was unacceptable. But the season has been very acceptable. And I’ll tell you, the season isn’t over, all right?”

For most of Krzyzewski’s career, college basketball coaches have undeniably been the focus of their sport. As the Coach K brand was ascending in the 1990s, there was an amazing series of ESPN commercials with singer Robert Goulet crooning and bebopping about Dean Smith, Bobby Knight, Rick Pitino, Rick Majerus and Nolan Richardson. The actual players who made them rich and famous were completely incidental.

That’s how it’s always been in college sports. The unpaid players come and go, so the highly paid coaches are the stars — none bigger than Krzyzewski, whose greatest strength was the ability to recruit the best players and adapt over the decades to whatever style of roster-building was best suited to the era.

There are many great coaches — Michigan State’s Tom Izzo, for example — who seem as if they’re in a constant rage against the natural evolution of society because it does not fit their basketball paradigm. Krzyzewski rolled with the punches and figured out whatever he needed to figure out. It was undoubtedly the reason he lasted as long as he did, putting out really good teams all the way until his 42nd and final year.

But with Krzyzewski’s generation of coaches aging out of the sport — Roy Williams beat him to retirement by a year, while Jim Boeheim is still hanging on and Izzo is grumping his way toward the eventual end — it’s a good time for a reset on what the job is supposed to be.

Over the next 40 years, coaches will not mean nearly as much in college basketball as they did for the previous 40.

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That’s just the reality of a new era where players can cash in on their name, image and likeness, enjoy more liberal transfer rules and will potentially be paid directly as employees in the future. In that world, the factors that drive success will be much closer to a professional sports model where efficiency, analytics and overall organizational strength hold more value than the superstar coach.

When you see the future of college sports in those terms, Krzyzewski’s over-the-top farewell looks like a time capsule. Whenever Gregg Popovich retires from the San Antonio Spurs, there will not be people camping out for weeks at a time outside the AT&T Center for his final game, nor will it cost more for a ticket than the Super Bowl.

It will almost certainly be a saner, more low-key affair that does not attempt to elevate him to a deity, only for his team to lose to the Houston Rockets.

That’s basically what happened Saturday at Cameron. Without all the fluff, Duke losing to an inferior team in a rivalry game isn’t really a big deal. There’s still an ACC tournament and an NCAA tournament to play, and Duke can still send Krzyzewski into retirement by celebrating a Final Four or a national title.

But Duke hyped this game as the official send-off. Duke brought in as many former players as could come to watch it. Duke wanted this to be the biggest event of the college basketball season. And Duke’s basketball team didn't do a great job handling it, which turned it into a far weirder night than the happier one they all expected.

There aren’t many more college basketball coaches left who could expect a tribute of similar magnitude. Izzo, Boeheim, Bill Self, maybe John Calipari or Mark Few. For a lot of reasons, the era of the larger-than-life coach is soon coming to an end.

Let’s hope the larger-than-life retirement tour is ending even sooner.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Coach K's over-the-top Duke goodbye signals fading era of star coaches