Former Sooners coach Jeff Capel goes back to Duke

Former OU Sooners basketball coach Jeff Capel, has returned to his alma mater (Duke University) to serve as an assistant to his former coach and college basketball coaching icon - Mike Krzyzewski. 

Capel was ousted from OU after two back-to-back dismal seasons amid even more controversy surrounding the investigation into the wrong doings of one of his former assistant coaches (Oronde Taliaferro).  Nothing has come out of an investigation of Taliaferro to date, so most people believe that Capel will continue his coaching career unscathed. 

Jeff Capel got caught into a quandary of high expectations from the OU brass by recruiting two McDonald's All-Americans the year after Blake Griffin elected to turn professional.

Those two players, Tiny Gallon and Tommy Mason-Griffin, joined another top high school player from Texas - Willie Warren (who had already been recruited to OU the previous year), to put Jeff Capel in a must-win coaching situation for the 2009-2010 season. 

Warren, with probably a little help from his old team mate Blake Griffin, ended-up grabbing one of the last spots on the Los Angeles Clipper's roster, and has played primarily for the Clippers' developmental league team. 

But neither Mason-Griffin nor Gallon were able to latch on with any NBA team, thus squashing their hidden-agenda and ploy all along of leaving OU early to turn professional and play in the NBA. 

Everyone knew that it was just a matter of time before Capel would surface somewhere in a high-profile situation.  "Jeff has been a highly successful head coach at the Division I level and will continue that here at Duke," said current Duke Head coach Mike Krzyzewski. 

Jeff Capel's most profound accomplishment at OU was signing all-everything Blake Griffin from Oklahoma Christian High School to a national letter of intent, after first landing his older brother Tyler, a couple of years prior. 

His leadership, along with Blake Griffin's spectacular play, took the Sooners to the Elite 8 where they eventually lost to the North Carolina Tar Heels, just one game short of making the Final Four.  

After matters went into disarray, and had spun far out of his control, sparking OU Athletic Director Joe Castiglione to make a coaching change, Jeff Capel still left newly-hired Sooners coach Lon Kruger with a nucleus of promising young talent from which to build on.

Now Kruger will have the proverbial "monkey on his back," and will have a short time to take OU from a cellar dweller lurking at the bottom of the pack, back to the top of the Big 12 Conference ranks again, because surely, OU's top brass surely won't accept anything less. 

At press, Capel was unavailable for comment on his recent coaching endeavor, but his new assistant coaching gig at Duke seems to be another in a long list and a flare for the dramatics, as well as a stepping stone in a coaching career that has never lacked excitement since day one - to say the least.

I'm just saying.  

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