Duke Blue Devils: GT hunting Jeff Capel
Georgia Tech has interest in the Duke Blue Devils Jeff Capel, but is it mutual?
Duke Blue Devils assistant Jeff Capel appears to be in high demand again this off season. Last year Arizona State took a run at the top Duke recruiter and were turned down. This time it will be fellow conference rival Georgia Tech who will try to pry Capel away from Mike Krzyzewski.
Georgia Tech fired Coach Brian Gregory after the former Dayton head man was unable to bring the school back to the promise it had in the early days of Paul Hewitt. One of the issues identified with Gregory’s tenure was probably the inability to attract top talent to the Yellow Jackets.
In that case, Capel makes sense for Georgia Tech. He is the guy most associated with turning Duke’s recruiting around. He was key in bringing in bringing in the trio of freshmen that won the National Title last year and are now in the NBA.
Capel has head coaching experience of his own too. He got his start at VCU, and was one of the first coaches to use success at that position to move to a bigger job. During his tenure at Oklahoma he rode the Griffin brothers all the way to the Elite Eight.
So the question becomes ‘what does Capel want?’ That may be a different way of saying ‘what would it take Capel to get the Duke job?’ Capel is only forty-one, and so he could simply wait out Coach K if he wanted to and if he believed remaining at Duke would yield him the top job.
Unlike other Coach K disciples, Capel does not need to prove that he can make a big program work so taking a big job might only hurt his chances of becoming Duke’s next coach if he was to fail. Capel did not seem to have the itch to be the head man when Arizona State came calling with a Pac-12 job last year.
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The thing that Georgia Tech would have to hope for is that an ACC job would be more important to Capel than a Pac-12 job. They would have to hope Capel would see the potential in bringing Tech back to prominence as a sure road to the Duke job when K retires.
The trick is that K may retire relatively soon while the Tech job may take three years to turn around. This is the same problem Mark Price ran into with the Charlotte 49ers. Price would be a logical target for Georgia Tech if he was further along in the turnaround process. However he has had only one rough transition year to look at right now.
My guess is that Capel will turn down the Yellow Jackets unless Coach K specifically tells him to take the job. He is patient and he has proved his value as an assistant to the Duke program. There must be some reward for doing that.