How -- and why -- Duke became the despised school

	Mike Krzyzewski has Duke at the top of the polls. Ronald Martinez/Getty Images

The preseason basketball polls are out and Duke is the solid No. 1. This is great news for Duke fans, and for all the people who root against Duke. This just gives them more incentive to vent their ugly wrath against the Blue Devils.

Why do so many people hate poor Duke? "ABD," people cry -- anybody but Duke. Opponents save their worst trash talk for the Dukies. Homophobic slurs seem preferred. Coaches and players alike grouse that Duke gets sweetheart coverage from television networks. Mike Krzyzewski, the Blue Devils' Hall of Fame coach, says it's a confounding phenomenon, totally out of character in amateur athletics. In fact, there's really been nothing like it in college sports unless you go back many decades to when Notre Dame's football juggernaut often faced an anti-Catholic bias.

Besides, everybody used to think Duke was cutie-pie, the superb little private school that got absolutely clobbered every week in football, then took it out on all the big state universities in basketball. Remember back then, nobody was more popular than Princeton -- the Ivy League's poor little rich kids were the people's choice whenever they played the just-folks scholarship students from State U. And Duke? Why, go back only 15 years ago, at a time when Duke was playing UNLV in the Final Four, and the Blue Devils were everybody's darling underdogs. Heavens to Betsy, it was Duke, puppy dogs and amber waves of grain.

How did things get so completely turned on its ear?

Well, first of all, Duke kept winning. The worm turned. No more sweetie underdogs. The Duke students, who would camp outside of Cameron Indoor Stadium for nights before big games and then cut up during the games in a most original fashion, were at first seen as delightful. As the victories piled up, though, the Dukies began to come across as spoiled brats -- condescending snobs, not court jesters.

Moreover, unlike the few other excellent private universities who compete in big-time athletics -- Stanford, Northwestern, Vanderbilt and Rice -- Duke remains pretty much a prophet without honor in its own land. Okay, maybe Duke's the pride of Durham, but there's the University of North Carolina a few miles down the road in Chapel Hill and North Carolina State a few miles away in Raleigh.  And the general feeling in the state is Duke is some kind of a fifth column of a team, cheered on by all these Yankee preppies, who come down to Tobacco Road and help deny our beloved Tar Heels and our beloved Wolfpack victories they truly deserve.

Trapped as it was between elitist Virginia and aristocratic South Carolina, North Carolina used to boast that it was "the valley of humility between two mounds of conceit." But that was never so when it came to hoops. Rah-rah, Car'lina/lina! Duke is an interloper, fair game, coast-to-coast. Outside of its own campus arena, Duke is probably most popular in Madison Square Garden, where -- North Carolinians contend -- all those suburban Yankee alumni who went to Duke only because they couldn't get into any Ivy League school show up, to cheer their faux Southerners on.

Oh well, maybe the antipathy will be spread around this year. The women's basketball team at Duke is also ranked No. 1.