You Mean, College Sports AREN'T Rocket Surgery?

I hate Duke. Not just because it has a rivalry with the University of North Carolina--which is one-sided, since UNC is better in every conceivable way--but because I dislike every person I have ever seen, met, or heard of who went there. The institution was founded by actual slave drivers who made a fortune selling cancer to poor people. Today, it is filled with overprivileged teenagers who think they own everything. And yet, they are morons.

The foremost joy in life for the last several years has been to watch Duke's basketball team fold up like a cheap tent every spring, just in time for the NCAA Tournament. It seems that every season begins with a dominant Duke team bolting out to a 10-0, 15-0, or 20-0 record, only to falter in February and March, leaving disappointed and teary-eyed fans to fling their snifters of brandy into their hearths before beating their illegal immigrant servants until their weak, bony girl-arms grow tired and they have to retire to the boudoir.

Now, a major sportswriter has decided to write about this phenomenon. Hooray! I mean, "word." Because I'm from UNC and I'm all street, and shit.

The conclusions of the article are hardly surprising: it turns out that, yes, Duke actually IS the State University of New Jersey and s--OK, so that isn't in there. But it should be.

It turns out that a cupcake non-conference schedule, plus a refusal to play road games, along with a highly-structured style of play that covers up glaring weaknesses in inferior players, equals gaudy numbers against low-level competition. Then, when Duke actually has to play somebody--anybody--on the road, it loses.

In other words, and I don't think I'm putting too fine a point on it, Duke is a con game--on the court just as much as in the classroom (you don't think it's really a $40,000-a-year education you're paying for, do you, dummy?). It's smoke and mirrors and the people who broadcast college basketball and vote in the national polls and pick the seeds in the NCAA Tournament should know that. Shame on them.

But more than that, shame on Duke. The nation's most visible basketball program is a tightly-controlled shell game for rubes, by which I mean the media and Duke students and fans. I wonder how they feel, now that a national magazine has made the argument that they are all just suckers? Oh, how it must hurt to be common!