Click here to send an email to Jim Young.
Pulse of the Fan Base is a Q&A with someone who’s in a position to speak with authority about how a particular school’s fans feel about certain issues affecting their program.
This week we trade emails with J.D. King, the co-founder of <DukeBasketballReport.com, which was one of the earliest fan sites online. King’s been going to games in Cameron Indoor Stadium since the year he was born. Clearly, he’s a guy in the know when it comes to Duke athletics.
Young:
I’m sure Duke fans are thrilled in general about how the football season has gone, but is there any grumbling about letting two golden opportunities slip away against Wake and N.C. State?
King:
I haven’t heard anyone who was really bent out of shape about it. Mostly I think people are really pleased that the football program has gotten up off the mat. And remember, they are two plays from being bowl-eligible right now. I think most Duke fans agree that it’s a remarkable transformation.
Young:
In general, what would you say Duke fans expect from football? Is it enough to just be competitive? Or do they expect bowl games on a regular basis?
King:
At this point, being competitive is pretty damn good. Over the last few years, from John Feinstein on down, a lot of people were suggesting Duke just give up. That was the mood. David Cutcliffe has done a 180, and while he probably won’t be coach of the year in the ACC, in my opinion, what he’s done has been just amazing and as fine a job as anyone else. If he really cranks things up, we might get spoiled, but winning a few games, at this point, is beautiful.
Young:
I get the feeling that the feelings of Duke fans toward what should otherwise be a promising basketball season are tempered by the fact that North Carolina is the clear favorite to win the national title. Is that a fair assessment?
King:
I think that’s always there on both sides of the fence, and both camps watch each other very closely. I don’t think any Duke fans were thrilled to see UNC have more success than Duke over the last couple of years, but I think there’s an understanding that this Duke team has the potential to be as good as anyone in the country. In my opinion, the anxiety that Duke fans used to have about UNC is mostly gone, or at least not the same as it was. There’s a lot to be proud of on both ends of 15-501. And by the way, for what it’s worth, go back fifteen or twenty years and see how often the favorite at the beginning of the season won the title. I’ll bet you, outside of Duke and Florida, it’s not often.
Young:
Do Duke fans think they have enough talent in the post to be a serious national title contender right now? Or do they think the Blue Devils are a season away from that?
King:
The offense isn’t there yet, but most fans I think would agree that the defensive potential of this team is huge, and as you know, when Duke is explosive defensively, they generally find a way to compete at a high level. Miles Plumlee has the usual up-and-downs of a freshman, but the kid is really, really agile, and he’ll continue to get better. Obviously Brian Zoubek is going to be counted on, and his basic skills have improved a lot. But the surprise may be Lance Thomas, who has obviously worked really hard and for the first time in his life has enough muscle to do stuff in the post. Duke fans who have seen him play a few times now will tell you he’s really gotten better. They still have Singler to rotate in on occasion, and possibly Olek Czyz, depending on how long it takes him to get up to speed.
Young:
How concerned are Duke fans that their program has been “passed” by the Tar Heels?
King:
Well if you accept the premise – and I don’t 0 maybe they’re annoyed, but it’s not like anyone’s calling for Krzyewski to step down or anything. I mean, everyone knows UNC is going to be good year in and year out. The Doherty era was an anomaly. UNC has been good since the 50’s, with two major dips, and Duke has been good since Vic Bubas showed up, with the exception of the early 70’s, the early 80’s, and 1995.
My personal preference is for everyone to be good. I’d personally like to see N.C. State become seriously powerful again and also would prefer really powerful teams in Washington, Boston, Atlanta, and Miami, for the obvious media reasons. Since Duke and UNC pretty consistently push each other to ridiculous heights, for one to be good just helps the other. After the Doherty meltdown, you’ll note, it didn’t take UNC too long to put things back in order.
Young:
Mike Krzyzewski insists that his time spent the past three years coaching the U.S. National Team didn’t detract from running the Duke program. What do fans of the Blue Devils think?
King:
There might have been some concerns, especially when Roy Williams was signing what seemed like a player a day, but the magnificent performance in Beijing, where the U.S. team really played the sort of basketball we’ve come to associate with Duke, gave Duke fans an enormous amount of pride.
Did it affect recruiting? That’s really hard to say unless you’re pretty directly involved in it, but if it had a negative affect before, with Miles and Mason Plumlee, Ryan Kelly, Josh Hairston, Tyler Thornton, and Andre Dawkins, it’s looking pretty positive now. Those players aren’t much behind UNC’s prospects, if at all. I don’t know how you could find a better endorsement for a high school prospect than LeBron James or Kobe Bryant or anyone else on that team talking about what a great experience it was to play for Mike Krzyzewski.
This whole idea of a dip has a lot more to do, in my opinion, with the early defections of Luol Deng, Shaun Livingston, and Josh McRoberts, who could have developed into a pretty interesting player. It would have been fun to see him and Kyle Singler together.
Young:
You’ve written before on your site about a perceived national media bias against the Blue Devils. Do you think Duke fans share your sentiments? Are you differentiating between television – which still seems to gush about Duke – and print and the internet?
King:
Oh, absolutely. It’s one of the more bizarre things in the game today, and I think almost all Duke fans would agree that it’s there and unfortunate.
Guys like Wendell Barnhouse, Gregg Doyel, Bomani Jones, and others have really hammered Duke. In Doyel’s case it’s a personal issue, but for others, who knows?
It runs the spectrum, and while it may be less on TV than in print or online, it’s there.
ESPN is particularly schizophrenic: on the one hand, they market Duke as heavily as possible for games; on the other, they have columns online and in their magazine which really seem to market to Duke hating. I’m sure they’ve done their research, and I’m sure they see an opportunity there.
When you say TV is more receptive, I think you may mean Dick Vitale, who does go on about Duke. It wasn’t all that long ago that Duke fans were equally sick of the constant “Michelangelo” and “General” crap, and the repeated assertions that Krzyzewski was a Colonel who wasn’t ready to be promoted. You take Vitale for what he is: a basically decent guy who does hyperbole for a living. Vitale is a good man, but he likes to be associated with winners.
What was worse for a lot of Duke fans was when Billy Packer, in the first couple of minutes of the 2001 title game, after only a couple of whistles, announced that Duke was getting all the calls. How does that work?
No one has yet explained how Duke does this. Do they pay the officials? Put horse heads in their beds? It’s just stupid.
I’m not saying anyone should feel sorry for Duke or anything. But there’s a level of viciousness from various members of the media that goes beyond just disliking a school or a program and gets personal with 18 and 19-year-old kids. You know, personally, I’m not fond of UNC and find a lot of the recent behavior from Maryland fans, and coaches and administrators who tolerate them, despicable. But what’s the point of hatred over a game? More to the point, why would adults treat guys who are mostly teenagers this way?
Click here to send an email to Jim Young.