UNC Basketball: 7 reasons that North Carolina fans hate Duke

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DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA – MARCH 07: The Cameron Crazies cheer during the game between the Duke Blue Devils and the North Carolina Tar Heels at Cameron Indoor Stadium on March 07, 2020 in Durham, North Carolina. (Photo by Grant Halverson/Getty Images) /

The fans

Rarely will you find a more passionate — or insufferable — group of fans than that of the Duke Blue Devils, at least when it comes to the basketball program. Their interest in the football team is intermittent and fleeting at best, but that’s common for a school whose basketball program is lightyears ahead of its gridiron counterpart in terms of success and notoriety.

They take a lot of pride in the Blue Devils’ triumphs on the hardwood, and it makes perfect sense. They’ve had sustained success for better than three decades. They’ve watched as some of the best players in college basketball have come through the program and then gone on to have successful careers in the NBA. They boast the game’s all-time winningest head coach in Mike Krzyzewski. And, of course, those three national titles since 2001 seem to be a regular talking point. In the midst of all of that, they’ve become some of the most hated college basketball fans in the entire nation; not just to their neighbors in Chapel Hill.

Duke fans clamor and boast about the Blue Devils’ highly-ranked recruiting classes each year, despite the fact that they’ve resulted in just one national title over the past 10 seasons. Regardless, they’re ready to hang a preseason banner in the 9,300-seat gymnasium housed on the Duke campus each and every November. They taunt UNC fans at games and on social media with claims that Duke players have had better professional careers, and find ways to blame Roy Williams for former Tar Heels’ lack of success in the NBA. And their ability to ignore the team’s lack of true road games each year or their handful of first round NCAA Tournament losses is top-notch.

There are obviously other fan bases in college basketball that display comparable levels of hubris and superiority at times — Kansas, Kentucky, maybe even North Carolina — but the Blue Devils faithful take the cake. Maybe that kind of exuberance and excessive confidence comes with being one of the best in the game, and maybe we’re being too critical of them. Or maybe they’ve just made it really easy to dislike them.

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