For many college basketball fans, rooting for the Duke Blue Devils is roughly equivalent to rooting for the IRS. But as Gregg Doyel of CBS Sports points out, it wasn’t always that way. There was a time when the Blue Devils were a major underdog in college hoops; their tilt with UNLV in the 1990 title game was billed as “Good vs. Evil.”
With Duke playing the role of “good.”
When’s the last time you saw THAT headline?
What happened to make the Dookies basketball’s evil empire, with Mike Krzyzewski as Darth Vader? Doyel has a few theories, including Dick Vitale’s unabashed hype of the program, Christian Laettner’s stomp of Kentucky’s Aminu Timberlake during the 1992 tournament and a long line of Dookies with a penchant for “flopping” in the hopes of drawing charges. I’d add the “Cameron Crazies” to the list — the Duke student section that attends games with carefully-prepared and scripted chants and cheers, and is generally treated by the basketball media as the inventors of college basketball fandom. Oh, and Brian Zoubek’s tendency to be somewhat… liberal with his elbows won’t win Team Krzyzewski any fans, either.
Unfortunately, as of tonight we’ll all have another reason, as the Devils will be big favorites to knock off the tournament’s best story — the fifth-seeded Butler Bulldogs — and win another national title.
Do You Hate the Blue Devils? originally appeared on About.com Basketball on Monday, April 5th, 2010 at 08:11:26.
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