Jon Scheyer Is Sending A Message With His Non-Conference Gauntlet

Does it say more about Duke’s strength or the ACC’s potential weakness?

It’s a struggle to find a word to adequately describe the non-conference slate than Jon Scheyer has scheduled for his 2025-26 team.

Gauntlet? Murder’s row? Trial by fire? Perhaps the best is the simplest: unprecedented.

That’s the caliber of non-conference opponent the Blue Devils have on tap this season. With a road game against Michigan State, newly announced home game against Florida, and neutral site contests against Texas, Kansas, Arkansas, Texas Tech, and Michigan, Duke should have seven Q1 opportunities lined up. Many of them have the opportunity to be truly marquee wins: all seven of those teams have found themselves somewhere in a Way-Too-Early Top 25, while Florida, Arkansas, Texas Tech, and Michigan could all be in the Pre-Season Top 10.

Even Duke’s “buy” games aren’t as simple as you might expect: Scheyer will go into uncharted territory playing at Army (it’s been decades since Duke played a non-power conference team in a true road contest), while a recently reported buy game against Lipscomb is against a team that finished in the NET Top 100 last season.

At this point, Blue Devil fans know Scheyer does very little by accident—so this aggressive scheduling clearly means something. The question is, does it mean Scheyer is as high on this upcoming team as last year’s historic squad, or is it a reaction to another potentially down year in the ACC?

The answer is probably a combination of both. Lost in Duke’s late season dominance was the fact that the Blue Devils were racing from behind in search of a No. 1 Seed in the NCAA Tournament for much of last season. Despite stellar non-conference victories at Arizona and versus Auburn, the ACC slate posed very few challenges—certainly not of the caliber that Big 12 or SEC opponents were facing nearly every week. Duke arguably needed to go a historic 19-1 in conference play to earn that No. 1 Seed in a season that had more parallels to recent Gonzaga teams than Duke’s history in the ACC.

It’s no surprise, then, that Scheyer is essentially scheduling like Gonzaga has over the past decade, ensuring that the non-conference slate will provide the opportunities for marquee victories that the conference schedule can no longer guarantee. And given the narrative regarding SEC dominance that permeated the sport last season, it’s quite conspicuous that the Blue Devils will play three of that conference’s projected top squads.

But this schedule goes a step beyond even that explanation. Duke could have easily padded its schedule with games against middling Power 5 schools at neutral sites that were borderline Q1 games—more like the matchup against Illinois this past season. Perhaps the season opening game against Texas falls under this category. But every other marquee matchup is against a team that is likely to live in the Top 25 most of next season. That means this schedule is not just Scheyer and his staff working to massage the quadrant system and Duke’s metrics; rather, it’s likely indicative of a supreme confidence in his squad to win these games and position itself atop the college basketball world from the start of the season.

If this season’s Blue Devils are as good as Scheyer thinks they can be, this schedule will leave no doubt. True, some of the growing pains a young squad has to go through may yield losses against this caliber of opponent that might otherwise have been avoided. But if they do indeed grow, the Blue Devils will be likely be running ahead of the pack come the ACC schedule rather than fighting from behind. Clearly, that’s the position Scheyer prefers.