One of the commonly listed items in Duke-haters checklists is that Duke and Coach Krzyzewski unethically saddled interim coach Pete Gaudet with K’s losses in 1995. This story has always seemed like a non-issue to me, because Gaudet did coach that team for two losing months, but the controversy never seems to go away.
Well, with Duke now losing like it’s 1995, the Gaudet Issue has resurfaced like a sulphuric bubble popping out of a tar pit. Coach K was asked about it in his press conference yesterday and said that he thinks he should be saddled with the losses. Gary Johnson, the NCAA’s associate director of statistics says that the decision is totally up to Duke and they were well within their rights to assign the record to Gaudet. Duke did not have to “petition” the NCAA for anything. The NCAA leaves those sorts of decisions up to schools (which is amazing considering how much the NCAA does regulate).

To really discuss the situation, you have to go back and look at that year. Joe Ovies does a good job with his post at 850 The Blog. Folks seems to forget that Duke was actually having a pretty solid year. They were 9-2, they were ranked and they had beaten a couple of ranked teams already. They clearly weren’t as good as recent Blue Devils squads (not many teams are), but the only real hint of trouble occurred when they lost their ACC opener against Clemson. Anytime Duke loses to Clemson in Cameron it’s jarring, but no one really thought it meant that Duke sucked. That loss came on January 4. Coach K never coached again that season – including practices – and the Blue Devils completely fell apart, winning only four more games (including one in the ACC Tournament).
So again, Duke was 9-3 while K was on the bench. After he left, they went 4-15. Pete Gaudet ran the team for over two months and turned a 9-3 team into a 13-18 team.
Others point to some other examples where coaches have missed games, but still kept the results on their record. In all of the cases I’ve heard mentioned (there are a few in here), the coach missed only a small handful of games. In those cases, it makes sense to me to keep it on the record of the head coach. A few games isn’t enough to completely turn a team around, one way or the other. Two months is a different story. Coach K had no chance to address the problems of the team. He had no chance to see what the ACC teams were doing and adjust. He had no chance to go through the league a second time trying different things. Simply put, Coach K was not coaching his team. Why should he take the record? Do you really think that team goes 2-14 in the ACC with Krzyzewski on the bench?
So let’s give this one a rest folks. You can find plenty of reasons to dislike about Duke and Mike Krzyzewski. Doctoring his record isn’t a good one.