Why everyone hates Duke basketball and Coach K, explained

It’s not just UNC that Duke has beef with—here are a few reasons why Duke basketball and Coach K are both feared and hated across the NCAA. 

The fierce, eternal love that Blue Devils have for Duke is rivaled by how much the rest of the NCAA hates them. It extends beyond North Carolina, too: Duke is widely considered to be the most hated college basketball team in all of America.

Duke fans will reduce it to a singular reason—envy—but in reality, the reasons why are as varied as they are endless.

Here are a few reasons why March Madness fans may tire of seeing Duke advance through brackets and revolt if they win another championship.

Everyone hates Duke because they win… a lot

In sports, it’s often said that no one likes a sore loser, but it’s equally true that no one likes a dominant winner.

No matter the sport, if a team or athlete begins to win too much, a deep-seated hatred will brew. Especially if the athletes don’t appear spectacular—the importance of coaching is often overlooked, and fans will revolt if a team without star power defeats a superior team.

Well, that’s happened quite often during Coach K’s 42-year tenure at Duke, where he’s racked up a 1201–367 record and five NCAA Championships. Since 1985, Duke has 97-29 record in the NCAA Championship, so it’s more than likely that at one point or another, they managed to make enemies of new fanbases.

While Coach K is enjoying a majestic farewell tour that has yet to end, there are plenty of basketball fans who look forward to playing Duke without him at the helm.

Everyone hates Coach K because he is too smarmy and preachy

As much as spectacular athletes are forced to confront egos for team-building, the same exercise doesn’t always take place for coaches. When a coach is considered a genius and portrayed as being far superior to their peers, there’s nothing to give that coach a reality check the way media outlets and fans push confident athletes to check themselves.

So as much as Coach K is revered in some circles, there are also instances of the longtime Duke coach exposing his unrestrained ego over the years.

In 2016, Mashable’s Sam Laird outlined how Grayson Allen embodied the “arrogant sanctimony” of Coach K, down to the fact that Coach K was proven to have lied about a conversation with an opposing player and his refusal to bench Allen for a dirty play.

In 2021, Coach K went in on a student reporter who asked a fairly basic question: what’s your plan for next week?

To top it all off, Bleacher Report’s Eric Wright reserved a different kind of No. 1 ranking for Coach K: the college basketball coach with the biggest ego.

The Duke slap the floor defense is the definition of obnoxious

“In the final minute, after yet another Roach basket, they slapped the floor, like the Duke teams of old, reaching out into the past to touch spiritual hands with four decades of predecessors.”

That’s an eloquent way of describing a tradition that Duke fans love and opponents despise: Duke’s “slap the floor” defense has created a legacy, one that seems to embrace what people hate about Duke.

If the arrogance of Coach K, Duke fans and Duke players wasn’t clear, the tradition of slapping the floor summarizes it succinctly. As Nick Greene put it in Slate in 2018, “like expensive medical centers and college Republicanism, floor-slapping is something that has come to be expected from Duke.”

The tradition, which began spontaneously at some point during the 1980s, is a tactic often used in man-to-man coverage as a supposed attempt to intimidate opponents. More recently, it’s been used in zone coverage, which made no sense to Grant Hill in 2018, but of course Grayson Allen defended it.

After Coach K came away with his 100th NCAA Tournament win, he promptly began to slap the hardwood loudly, his players joining in. When asked about why he did so, he responded with “what the hell, why not?”

Again, Coach K echoed the tradition of the practice and how it joins hands with past teams. “Our guys really wanted that because it’s kind of like across the bridge to ‘The Brotherhood,’ you know? They can now say they did that. Hopefully, they can say that again, at least on Saturday.”

What’s even worse is that this cultural phenomenon is apparently engrained in the children who attend Duke’s basketball camp.

Dick Vitale, AKA “Dukie V”, harbors an annoying Duke bias

One of college basketball’s most iconic announcers has a reputation for effusively expressing his love of the game — and his love of the Dukies and Coach K.

The notion that the supposedly neutral ESPN announcer heavily favors Duke is so strong that sports journalists have endeavored to quantify it. In 2013, Wall Street Journal’s Ben Cohen created a scorecard using online comments to determine just how much Vitale leans in favor of Duke.

When Cohen’s research indicated that 13 percent of Vitale’s comments favored Duke and 11 percent favored their opponents, Awful Announcing responded with research of their own, featuring trademark Vitale quotes over the years.

When talking about Coach K in 2001, Vitale said the Duke coach is “about people and about winning in life!” Anecdotal or not, thousands of basketball fans have picked up on the overt gushing for the “Dukies”, a nauseating nickname for those who aren’t Blue Devils.

Elitist Duke fans think they’re smarter than everyone else

In the United States, there’s a historic distaste for blue-bloods, most commonly in politics. Politicians born of wealthy backgrounds are seen as unrelatable to the general public.

In college basketball, those blue-bloods would be the Blue Devils, the private school kids who have seemed to embody privilege for decades. Their fans are obnoxious about the exclusivity of Duke and its reputation as one of the Southern Ivies.

Sports Illustrated painted a clear picture of what this looks like: “Taunts such as ‘Safety school!’ (toward Wake Forest) and ‘We’re smart! You’re dumb!’ (at UNC) that play off Duke’s academic standards continue to anger not only opponents but also many among the 4,000-plus students who don’t attend games.”

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