Stanford University hired longtime Duke assistant Johnny Dawkins as their new head men's basketball coach, replacing former coach Trent Johnson, who left the school to fill the open job at LSU.  Some might say this is a slam dunk hire; others, like myself, are looking at this for what it is - the ultimate judgment of Mike Krzyzewski's coaching tree.

Dawkins has been hyped for years as Coach K's prodigy.  He's been a Duke assistant for 11 seasons, nine of those as the associate head coach.  It was even speculated for a while that Dawkins was being groomed as his eventual replacement.  I'd often wondered, if he was such a fantastic prospect of a coach, why he hadn't been offered a head job somewhere.

Maybe the reason is that, for the most part, Krzyzewski's protoges haven't fared all that well.  Check out some of the leaves of the Coach K tree:

• Mike Brey (not a lot of people remember that he came from Duke, but he's probably their most successful former assistant)
• Bob Bender (a general disaster at Washington)
• Jeff Capel (pretty solid career so far at VCU and Washington)
• Tommy Amaker (left a mess in his wake at Seton Hall, needed help from Dick Vitale to get the job at Michigan, and then departed under shaky circumstances from Michigan, where he never made the tournament in seven seasons)
• David Henderson (irrelevant at Delaware)
• Neil Dougherty (TCU; who?  'Nuff said.)
• Quin Snyder (recruited well, coached poorly, and had a litany of questionable incidents at Missouri - if he was a Bob Huggins assistant, I can only imagine how the national press would have treated this guy)

No one ever seems to want to discuss this in relation to Coach K, but his assistants have been some of the most overrated in college basketball.  As much hype as Dawkins has garnered over the years, the pressure ought to be on him to produce.  We'll just have to sit back and see how this works out.