While Duke didn’t have the season it was looking for, as it didn’t win a National Title, the brand is still the brand. If Duke’s head coaching job ever became available, nearly every coach in the country would listen.
That was all but confirmed this week after CJ Moore’s latest poll. According to Moore, current coaches around the game believe Duke is the best job in the world. It’s almost impossible to argue when we look at the history and future of this program.
“The Blue Devils have been to 40 of the last 42 NCAA Tournaments and won five national titles during that run, and thus, ‘In this generation, there’s nobody, no kid or his parent, that remembers Duke being bad,’ one high-major assistant said.
“‘And so Duke is historical to this generation.’ Duke is the brand, and has all of the resources to win in this era. In just the last 10 years, Duke has had 13 lottery picks, a list that includes some of the NBA’s biggest stars (Jayson Tatum, Zion Williamson, Paolo Banchero and Cooper Flagg). While Jon Scheyer has yet to win a title, he has won 70 games the last two seasons and seems to win just about every recruiting battle,” he wrote.
There’s a lot more here than just wins and NBA players. In this current era, everything is about how much NIL money a program has. We can make predictions and go based on reports, but we’ll never know what’s going on in terms of an actual number.
However, this goes to show that Duke is at the top of that, too, which we already knew.
“The gap between traditional powers and some other programs has gotten smaller because of NIL and the portal,” said one mid-major coach, per Moore.
“For a long time, big fan bases were the superpower, but now those expectations can be a disadvantage. Fans don’t understand why a player would go to Auburn over Kentucky, Miami over North Carolina, Texas Tech over Kansas — but it happens all the time now. If you have the right NIL, you can get elite talent without the same level of pressure as the blue bloods.”