For the first time in four seasons, Jon Scheyer is not the ACC’s youngest coach. He’s not even the second-youngest.
The honor for greenness goes to Luke Loucks, 35, a former Leonard Hamilton player at Florida
State. Then there’s 36-year-old Jai Lucas, an ex-Scheyer assistant now directing the Miami program.
Scheyer, 38, is older than both of the ACC’s newest Coach Ls. (You’ll recall that Jim Larranaga, whom Lucas replaced, was called “Coach L”.) Scheyer is among three ACC head coaches with Duke connections, along with Lucas and Jeff Capel.
Lucas played at Texas. Capel played and served as a Mike Krzyzewski assistant at Durham prior to Scheyer’s arrival on campus. Entering his eighth season at Pitt, Capel is now the second-most senior coach in the league after Clemson’s Brad Brownell. It’s worthy of mention that, working at arguably the ACC’s toughest outpost, Brownell has notched more than 100 victories beyond anyone else in Clemson history.
Loucks and Lucas bring to five the number of men currently directing ACC men’s programs who never previously served as a college varsity head coach. Besides Scheyer, those ranks include UNC’s Hubert Davis and Syracuse’s Adrian Autry. Combined they represent 28 percent of the ACC men’s head coaches this season.
Interestingly, two of the most successful head coaches in league history took over at Duke and North Carolina at the dawn of the 1960s without a lick of varsity head coaching experience. Vic Bubas came over from assisting Everett Case at NC State and turned Duke into a national power, with three Final Four appearances (1963, 1964, 1966) and four ACC titles (those years plus 1960) in a decade on the job.
In 1962 Dean Smith stepped up from working as a Frank McGuire assistant and for more than three decades fashioned a program that came to define ACC basketball. Smith won more college games than anyone else prior to his 1997 retirement (879 versus 254 losses). His 11 Final Four appearances, three in succession from 1967 to 1969, rank third all-time behind Krzyzewski (13) and UCLA’s John Wooden (12) and just two ahead of Roy Williams, his protégé at North Carolina.
Bubas never won an NCAA championship, but Krzyzewski (5), Williams (3), and Smith (2) did. The last ACC coach to win a national title was Virginia’s Tony Bennett in 2019.
| SPECIAL DELIVERY NCAA Men’s Champions From Member Schools While In ACC |
|
|---|---|
| Year Won | School |
| 1957 | North Carolina |
| 1974 | NC State |
| 1982 | North Carolina |
| 1983 | NC State |
| 1991 | Duke |
| 1992 | Duke |
| 1993 | North Carolina |
| 2001 | Duke |
| 2002 | Maryland |
| 2005 | North Carolina |
| 2009 | North Carolina |
| 2010 | Duke |
| 2015 | Duke |
| 2017 | North Carolina |
| 2019 | Virginia |
