Like it or not, Blue Devils are winners

Sportscasters say many sports fans dislike Duke University’s basketball team, which once again won the NCAA national championship.

Why? Well, like the New York Yankees, it wins a lot. Duke has played in the final game for the Men’s Division I national basketball championship eight times in the last 24 years, almost twice as often as any other team.

But Duke’s real sports success lies elsewhere. In 71 years, except for Stanford University in 1942, Duke is the only one of America’s academically rated Top 10 universities ever to have competed in the final round of the national basketball championship.

Since 1987, U.S. News & World Report has annually ranked America’s universities. In 22 of 23 years, Duke was ranked in the Top 10. Others most often in this category are Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Chicago, MIT, Columbia, Cal Tech, Penn and Stanford. In demonstrating excellence in both academics and men’s basketball, Duke has no rival.

Recently Arne Duncan, U.S. Secretary of Education, suggested banning college teams from post-season play if they graduated less than 40 percent of their players. He noted that among universities in this year’s NCAA basketball playoffs, Baylor graduated only 36 percent, Kentucky 31 percent, California 20 percent and Louisville 38 percent. Although there are various methods of figuring college graduation rates, in the last decade Duke graduated 100 percent of its basketball players who stayed four years. Using the Graduate Success Rate followed by the NCAA, Duke in 2009 graduated 92 percent.

The money-grubbing commercialism found in many NCAA Division I college sports programs merits censure.

During the declining Roman Empire, after Romans enjoyed watching professional gladiators fight, they tossed their broken bodies into the street. Universities that recruit students with little chance of ever graduating seem comparably callous.

Duke’s rigorous academic standards require its famously successful Coach Mike Krzyzewski to recruit from a much smaller pool of high school athletes than most other college coaches. But obviously, Coach K and Duke value not just athletic prowess but also academic success and well-formed character. Coach K turned down the chance to coach Kobe Bryant and the L.A. Lakers, and also reportedly declined to coach the New Jersey Nets at $12 or $15 million per year average. Why? Maybe Coach K and Duke value money less than the opportunity to develop both mind and body, to encourage both intellectual growth and athleticism among the young.