Big Shoes

Jon Scheyer replaced Mike Krzyzewski as Duke basketball's head coach in 2022 with no prior head coaching experience. Three years later, he's the fastest coach in ACC history to 100 wins and has taken Duke to the Final Four. In the series finale of Big Shoes, we break down how Duke pulled off one of the cleanest coaching transitions in college basketball history, and how the same strategy played ou...

Pat Summitt took over as Tennessee's head coach at 22 with no budget, no staff, and no scholarships to offer. By the time she was done, she had eight national championships, 1,098 wins, and had basically built women's college basketball into what it is today. This episode is about what she built, how she built it, and--maybe more importantly--what happens to a program when the person it was built...

Barry Bonds is one of the most feared hitters in baseball history — 688 intentional walks, a single-season home run record that still stands, and a statistical page on Baseball Reference that's roughly half bold letters. He spent 15 years as the face of a franchise that was, in a lot of ways, his family's team before it was even his. And when he left, the Giants didn't try to replace him. They cou...

Harry Kane is one of the greatest strikers of his generation--a boyhood Spurs fan who joined the club at ten, was almost never given a chance, and then somehow became the most prolific scorer in their history. So how did Tottenham manage to waste nearly a decade of him at his peak? In this episode, I talk with Jack Pitt-Brooke of The Athletic about what made Kane so special, why Spurs couldn't cap...

In the mid-2000s, the Phoenix Suns were doing something nobody had ever seen before. They ran a high-tempo, small-ball offense so good that teams literally didn't know how to prepare for it. Steve Nash and Mike D'Antoni. Three division titles in a row. And yet, for all of that, they never won a ring. This is the story of how a franchise that had everything--a generational system, a Hall of Fame co...

Nick Saban didn't just win football games at Alabama—he became, as one reporter put it, "the spiritual leader of the state." In this episode, we dig into what Saban actually built in Tuscaloosa, why it was so hard to replace him, and what it really means to follow a legend. Featuring AL.com columnist Michael Casagrande, who was there from day one (and got compared to rodenticide one time). Hosted...

When Jurgen Klopp announced he was leaving Liverpool in January 2024, the club had six months to replace one of the most beloved managers in their history. They didn't panic. They didn't try to find "the next Klopp." They built a structure. Liverpool brought back Michael Edwards, the sporting director who'd operated in the shadows during their peak years. They hired Arne Slot, a relatively unknown...

Lightning doesn't strike the same place twice. Manchester United spent a decade learning that the hard way. Between 1993 and 2013, Sir Alex Ferguson won 13 Premier League titles at United. Then he retired, and David Moyes lasted less than a year as his replacement. Van Gaal came and went. So did Mourinho and Solskjaer. More than a decade later, the crisis still hasn't stopped. This is the story of...

In May 2013, Sir Alex Ferguson retired from Manchester United after 26 years. His replacement, David Moyes, inherited a championship team from arguably the greatest manager of all time. One year later, Moyes was fired after United's worst season in over two decades. That story isn't unique to Manchester United. Not even close. Big Shoes is a narrative sports podcast about succession—what happens w...