Andy Bagwell - Duke Still Sucks: More Completely Unbiased Thoughts about the Most Evil Team on Planet Earth

Duke Still Sucks

More Completely Unbiased Thoughts About the Most Evil Team on Planet Earth

By Andy Bagwell and Reed Tucker

Foreword by Tate Frazier

Art by Joel Tesch

Duke Still Sucks

More Completely Unbiased Thoughts About the Most Evil Team on Planet Earth

Copyright 2023 by THBTHD, LLC

Foreword 2023 by Tate Frazier

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Printed in the United States of America.

First Printing, 2023

ISBN 979-8-218-13999-5

DukeStillSucks.com

Illustrations by Joel Tesch, joeltesch.com

To keeping hate alive. Even after a page turns.

Table of Contents

Im gonna write a book called UNC Sucks.

After we put out Duke Sucks way back in 2012, that was the No. 1 comment we heard. That book was a collection of essays examining why exactly so many people around the world felt the same way about the Blue Devils as they do about rhinovirus.

The idea grew out of a podcast we used to do called Tar Heel Bred, Tar Heel Dead. If you hadnt guessed from that title, we, your humble authors, are UNC grads and bleed light blue. We used to end every podcast episode with that weeks reason why Duke sucked, and never one time did we struggle for content.

So we started thinking about undertaking a larger investigation into Duke hatred, compiling an airtight indictment of that horrible little basketball team from Durham and its eternally insufferable (now former) coach. Turns out, the book had its fans, and its still in print as we type this.

But it also had its critics. And thats where Im gonna write UNC Sucks comes in.

Weird thing is, years and years later, were still waiting for that book.

The same goes for Kentucky Sucks or Kansas Sucks or Villanova Sucks or whatever other school you want to drop in there.

But weve got a sneaking suspicion that no matter how many times we check our local Barnes & Noble, those books are never going to appear. And the reason theyre not is that theres just not enough material to fill them. A nice newspaper article? Maybe. A cutting tweet? Oh, no doubt. But a full-fledged book? Nah.

And the audience for those books might have trouble filling a decent-sized dorm room. UNC has its haters, but does that dislike rise to the level that would motivate readers to spend actual legal tender on an entire book? We seriously doubt it.

Duke is just different and not in a good way. It has something special. Just seeing that D logo or those dark-blue uniforms evokes a hatred that is unique among the 350-plus teams that make up Division I basketball. The Blue Devils are what happens when God asks, What would a professional wrestling heel look like as a college basketball team?

And even though players come and go sometimes within a matter of weeks and even though legendary coaches move on, Duke is still Duke. The things we dislike about it dont change. They only evolve.

Occasionally over the years since Duke Sucks came out, we considered a sequel. Every single season seemed to bring new horrors. But finally, with Coach K retiring in 2022 and Duke and North Carolina meeting in the Final Four the same year, it seemed like the universe was telling us something. It was time.

What you hold in your hands is that sequel, covering all the Duke basketball lowlights since 2012. And once again, we didnt have to search too hard. The book practically wrote itself, and we fully expect to be back in a decade or so. See you then.

by Tate Frazier

Hating Duke isnt a novel concept. Its been well-documented not the least of which in the original Duke Sucks book and by this point, everyone whos currently reading this second volume gets it.

I grew up in Henderson, North Carolina, surrounded by Tar Heels in my family. It was a given I would be indoctrinated into all things Carolina, especially basketball.

That meant I knew how to hate Duke before I even knew my ABCs. Its simple really. You know the tropes: Its public versus private, its North Carolina natives against outsiders from the North, and, ultimately, its Good versus Evil.

My parents drilled this into me from the day I was born at Maria Parham hospital back in 1993. Were a true Tobacco Road family. My mom graduated from UNC in 1982, and famously painted Chapel Hill Carolina blue after my pawpaw gave her a bucket of paint on the night Dean Smith won his first national title.

According to my parents, I was crying tears of joy in my crib as Donald Williams led the Tar Heels to Coach Smiths second national title over the Fab Five just a few weeks after I was born. Throughout my childhood, my older brother Gill and I rewatched a tape of that game countless times on our VHS player.

My parents dreamed we would both go to UNC, and fortunately we both did. I graduated in 2015 with a degree in broadcast journalism and ended up taking a job out in Los Angeles working with a sports guy by the name of Bill Simmons. Fast forward some 20 years later, and I chose Woody Durhams famous technical foul, technical foul call from the 93 title game to create the intro music for my podcast, Titus & Tate.

It always comes back to Carolina basketball, and everything I know and believe can be traced back to being born a Tar Heel. Its a serious born-bred-dead situation. If youre a North Carolina native, college basketball is in our blood. Thats why I feel incredibly fortunate to talk about the sport for a living. Most people are stuck with got-to jobs. Im lucky enough to have a get-to job. I get to talk about college basketball and not only that, but to talk about Carolina basketball, just like one of my idols, Stuart Scott, did on SportsCenter when I was growing up.

But this life has its downsides. It also means I have had to talk about the team eight miles down the road from Chapel Hill. And for many years, I had to talk about the man known by just one letter: K.

Until he retired, Coach K had been a constant through much of my life (except for the 95 season when he bailed and stuck Pete Gaudet with all those Ls), and he became the literal face of evil for me. When I watched Star Wars, Id picture K under Darth Vaders mask. When Voldemort was mentioned in the Harry Potter series I read as a kid, Id picture Coach Ks face. When the preacher mentioned the actual devil in churchyou know where this is going.

Krzyzewski was the perfect adversary as a kid, and through him, I learned about good and evil in the world. My first lesson came when I heard the story of K calling out Dean Smith for a double standard when it came to treatment in the ACC. Now, Coach Smith is an untouchable figure in my home, so when I heard there was a coach who would say such hateful things about Smith, I was immediately done with him. The irony of it all is that K wanted that double standard for his own team.

With every Duke game I watched witnessing the teams flopping and antics my disdain only grew. I guess it was gamesmanship, but it represented the opposite of the Carolina Way. Then there was the fear K seemingly instilled in the refs and how that allowed his teams to stay in games and foul constantly without whistles blowing.

Things started to change around the time I went to college in 2011. All of a sudden, Duke was playing the one-and-done game, which was a complete contradiction to everything K supposedly represented. He went from the Wojos of the world to using USA Basketball to create a pipeline that funneled straight to Duke. He went from preaching a student-athlete approach to promoting the six-month stints of players like Kyrie Irving and Austin Rivers. And when five-stars like Semi Ojeleye or Joey Baker didnt work out, hed kick them to the curb like Leonardo DiCaprio to a girlfriend whos old enough to legally rent a car.