Wojo mojo: Coach K's right-hand man getting it right at Marquette

MILWAUKEE – Steve Wojciechowski is no Mike Krzyzewski. Please, please, please – don’t expect him to be a carbon copy of the legendary Duke coach he played under for four years and has been an assistant coach under for the past 15.

He is not one who waxes philosophical in interviews like Coach K, instead just sticking to the facts. He is not the wise, respected coach emeritus of his profession, although Wojo has been at the top of Coach K’s line of succession for years. He does not have a coaching record that’s nearing 1,000 wins – in fact, Wojo doesn’t have a single victory to his credit as a head coach as he begins his first season at Marquette University.

Wojo is no Buzz Williams, either. The man who is taking over after Williams’ six-year reign isn’t at all like the folksy, funny, quotable Texan who preceded him. Wojo might have the blue blood of Duke running through his veins, but he’s really a Baltimore kid, blue-collar to the bone, son of a Port of Baltimore longshoreman. Someone who doesn’t perform for the cameras but instead is more an everyday guy who, as one assistant told me, loves recruiting the “lunchpail kids” – kids who come to the gym ready to work every single day.

Perhaps the best thing Steve Wojciechowski can be in his first head-coaching gig is, simply, Steve Wojciechowski: a no-BS, straight-shooting, nose-to-grindstone type who’ll fit right into this chip-on-its-shoulder Midwestern town.

OK, sure, there are plenty of photos on his office walls of Wojo with Coach K, and with the Team USA Basketball players he’s spent plenty of summers around as an assistant coach: Melo, Kobe, Bosh. And he can sound like Coach K at times, too, like when he says, “No group ever achieves great things without having great trust,” or, “When it’s played correctly, basketball is the most beautiful game out there, favoring the continuous thinker.”

But right now, Wojo being Wojo seems to be working out well for the man with the lunchpail mentality in the city with the lunchpail mentality.  Except for one slip-up. Throwing the first pitch at a Milwaukee Brewers game, Wojo was so determined he wouldn’t bounce it that he instead sailed the baseball over the catcher’s head.

“Hard to leave Duke? Yes. But easy to come to Marquette? Yes,” Wojo said a couple weeks ago in his office at the Al McGuire Center on Marquette’s urban campus. “This is a school that’s committed to its basketball program. The basketball program is part of the fabric of the school. That sort of commitment is really important to me.”

What sort of commitment? How about this: There are only five schools in the country that spent more money on men’s basketball than Marquette, according to the U.S. Department of Education’s most recent data.

Ready for this impressive list? Louisville, Duke, Syracuse, Kentucky and UCLA.

Pretty good company.

Does all that mean Wojo will immediately return Marquette to the Elite Eight height of the Buzz Williams regime, or the Final Four peak of Tom Crean before that?

Not a chance.

Wojo arrived at Marquette to a cabinet that was pretty bare after last season’s disappointing 17-15 record in the inaugural year of the new Big East Conference. It was the first time Marquette missed the NCAA tournament in nine years, and Wojo has lost 70 percent of the scoring and 63 percent of the rebounding from a team that struggled to score. Looking ahead, there won’t be much margin for error this year. Marquette will have only a nine-man roster until mid-December, when Indiana transfer Luke Fischer becomes eligible.

But it’s a college hoops aphorism that a new coach’s success depends on his first two recruiting classes, and by that measure Wojo is sitting pretty. Plus, he added sharp-shooting BYU graduate transfer Matt Carlino to shore up one of the program’s on-court problems. (The Golden Eagles ranked 276th in the nation in 3-point shooting percentage last season, 323rd the season before.)

There’s no saying how a longtime assistant will fare as a head coach, no matter the coaching tree. No Coach K assistant has become an all-time great like former Rick Pitino assistants (Billy Donovan) or former Larry Brown assistants (Bill Self and John Calipari), but there’s still been a good amount of success: Tommy Amaker, Mike Brey, Johnny Dawkins. Chris Collins took the Duke model to Northwestern a year ago, and now Wojo is trying to take that same model to Marquette: aggressive, up-tempo, drive-and-kick basketball that allows the freedom to make plays.

Wojo might not be the world’s most fiesty fellow, but it’s not as if all the best young coaches in his generation of college basketball – the Fred Hoibergs, the Brad Stevenses – are Bobby Knights or John Caliparis.

Chris Carrawell, who played with Wojo at Duke, got a simple text from Wojo shortly after Marquette hired its new coach: “You coming with?” Carrawell was coaching in the NBA Developmental League at the time, but there was no question he would go wherever Wojo went.“He could have gone to Utah or to Idaho – it didn’t matter. If he asked me to join his staff, I’d follow,” Carrawell said. “When he was a player, he was like a coach on the floor, an extension of Coach K, just the way he prepared and practices. The way we proved ourselves was to try and keep up with Wojo.”

Wojo’s first Marquette team could make the NCAA tournament, but I don’t expect it to be a world-beater. Plenty will fall on the shoulders of seniors like Carlino, Juan Anderson and point guard Derrick Wilson, who hoisted more than 20,000 shots over the summer to improve his outside shooting. The most talent is among the sophomores: undersized but athletic forward Deonte Burton, and JaJuan Johnson, who’ll get more than the 13 minutes a game he averaged a year ago.

One point in Wojo’s and Marquette’s favor: He didn’t scramble to fill spots for this season the moment he got hired. That would have been a short-term solution that would have hurt the program in the long term. Instead, he patiently started building his 2015 recruiting class, a patience that looks to have paid off now that Ellenson is aboard.

“My job was just to show them who I am, my vision for the program,” Wojo told me. “There’s a fresh start for everyone. I want our guys to be part of something special. I’m a product of a great college experience. I know what it looks like and feels like, and I want to create that here.”

Email Reid Forgrave at reidforgrave@gmail.com, or follow him on Twitter @reidforgrave.