WASHINGTON, D.C. — After coach Jon Scheyer and his Duke men’s basketball team had clinched their third Atlantic Coast Conference title in his four seasons, his young daughter got the last question at his postgame press conference.
“How do you win every game?” she asked.
Out of the mouths of babes.
Young Noa Marie Scheyer is not wrong. And, really, it’s a question for the entire Duke athletics department.
This year, the Blue Devils became the first team in the Football Bowl Subdivision, the highest level of NCAA competition, to win conference titles in football, men’s basketball and women’s basketball in the same academic year.
Scheyer and his Blue Devils advanced to the Elite Eight for the third consecutive year with a comeback victory Friday night against St. John’s in Washington, D.C. Kara Lawson and the Duke women’s team will play for a spot in the Final Four on Sunday, too, after a buzzer-beating 3-pointer to beat LSU on Friday night in Sacramento, California.
Coast to coast, all they do is win — even in college athletics most turbulent times.
“The standard is the standard,” said Duke football coach Manny Diaz, who claimed the school’s first outright ACC title since 1962 in the fall. “Duke is Duke. And if it’s got those four letters attached to it the standard is excellence.”
A Durham private school with high academic standards, an undergraduate enrollment of about 6,500 and an annual tuition of $90,000, Duke has long had success on the hardwood — as the five national title banners, all won since 1991, hanging above iconic Cameron Indoor Stadium can attest.
But the Blue Devils’ overall success, especially as name, image and likeness and revenue sharing have radically altered the college sports landscape, suggests a larger plan at a time when historical success means less than ever to a new generation of players.
Duke promoted longtime department executive Nina King to athletics director in May 2021 as the world was still dealing with the impacts of COVID-19, weeks before legendary men’s basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, responsible for those five national titles, announced his plan to retire and months before the NCAA allowed players to profit from their NIL.
As a private school, Duke doesn’t have to release its financial data. NC State and North Carolina, the Blue Devils’ Triangle ACC rivals, have athletics department deficits. The university can and does help with additional funding. At Duke, the investment from the university is a “significant part” of the department’s revenues, King told Yahoo! Sports.
“We want to stay elite,” King said. “We can’t fall behind in terms of our athletic brand, who we are and how we compete.”
Alignment and good hires
Not falling behind, especially right now, requires investment, including in football, where Duke was once considered one of the worst programs in the nation. The Blue Devils went 17 seasons from 1994 to 2012 without reaching a bowl game. In the last four seasons, Duke is 35-18 and has won at least eight games and reached a bowl each year.
Duke paid a reported $8 million over two years for quarterback Darian Mensah, who led the ACC in passing yards and touchdowns during their championship season.
“In the two and a half years I’ve been here, with as turbulent as college sports is, particularly with football, there have been plenty of chances where Duke has had the opportunity to blink and say, ‘You know what, this is as far as we’re going to go.’ And it’s really been the opposite,” Diaz said.
King said the university and the athletic department were ready for the changes of NIL and, now, revenue sharing, in part, because of the alignment between President Vincent Price and the school’s board of trustees.
Alignment is a word Duke officials use often.
“You don’t win without it,” Diaz said. “It starts at the top.”
Said Lawson: “Honesty, integrity, attention to detail. A lot of the similarities in what’s important to us. So I think, like anything, whether it’s your family or it’s at your church or it’s at your job, when you are about a lot of the same foundational principles — that’s the alignment, right? That’s that word. You’re going to have a lot in common and be able to have a great connection.”
Duke coaches and others are quick to praise Price, the board of trustees, King and the school’s boosters.
Price has been president since 2017 after a lengthy academic career that included, among other places, stops at Stanford and Michigan, elite academic universities with powerhouse athletic programs.
“How can you not think of Nina King and what she’s meant to our school?” Scheyer said after winning the ACC title. “President Price, who really knows sports and follows us. It stems from their leadership.”
King, as deputy athletics director, ran the process that landed on Lawson to lead the women’s basketball team. Lawson, a Boston Celtics assistant at the time, is now Team USA’s coach as well.
After Coach K announced his plan to retire after the 2021-22 season, Duke picked Scheyer, then a Duke assistant, to replace him — setting up one of the most successful succession plans in college athletics.
Diaz was hired in late 2023 to replace Mike Elko, who had two successful seasons before departing for Texas A&M.
“Hiring coaches, identifying talent, finding the right fit for our university and providing people with an opportunity to come here and be successful really is something I enjoy now,” King said.
It has culminated in sustained success across the three major sports — and across other Olympic sports at Duke.
“President Price leads with incredible vision and unwavering integrity and the steady leadership of Nina King — along with the quality people leading the Blue Devil athletic programs — should be acknowledged and celebrated,” ACC commissioner Jim Phillps told WRAL.
“… We’re happy for Duke as they showcase what we want in this profession — competing at the highest level, having national success and doing it the right way.”
A culture of winning
It’s become tradition at Duke men’s basketball games to play DJ Khaled’s “All I Do Is Win.” At 35-2 this season, including an undefeated record at home, it’s not far off for the Blue Devils. The Duke women went 14-1 at home this season.
“Being at Duke, it’s a culture of winning but also a culture of working hard behind closed doors that winning illuminates,” said Duke women’s basketball player Taina Mair.
Now, as is often the case in March, it’s on display for the entire nation.
Both the men’s and women’s basketball teams swept the ACC regular-season and tournament titles. Scheyer’s team has been No. 1 for weeks and is the overall No. 1 seed in the tournament. Despite key injuries, the Blue Devils, led by the national player of the year in Cameron Boozer, are one win away from a second consecutive Final Four appearance and halfway to that elusive sixth national title. Lawson’s squad is in the Elite Eight for the second consecutive year, seeking its first Final Four since 2006 and first-ever national title.
If both teams win Sunday, it would be the second time in Duke history that they’ve reached the Final Four and just the 16th time by any school. NC State and UConn both did it in 2024. UConn could do it again this year.
The college landscape may be chaotic, but King said the guiding principle for her department hasn’t changed.
“To keep the Duke experience what it’s always been — an opportunity for our student-athletes to come to Duke and really be able to compete academically and athletically,” she said. “They get to play their sport, the sport that they’ve been training for so long, at a high elite athletic level and coming into academics at a really high level as well — and not be shy about wanting to do both really well.”
