I went to Duke, but I get it. The country is tired of hearing about how great it is. Ever since the back-to-back titles in ’91 and ’92, they’ve been overexposed and at times overrated. Plenty of reasons to get a little irritated.
Then there’s this from “RealTalkIowa,” the latest nominee in our “Anonymous Genius” series:
Must be the fat chicks and little Asian kids are spending too much time at the library.
Maybe this is why the Duke atmosphere is thought to be fading. Dukies used to be mean! I mean — they threw Twinkies on the court when Dennis Scott was introduced! Coach K went scrambling over to apologize to Bobby Cremins.
But when it comes to sheer obnoxious hostility, Duke simply can’t compete with the Anonymous Geniuses of the Web. Those days are gone.
For the record — Duke is just getting harder and harder to get into, and out of an undergrad population of 6,000 or so, it’s no longer realistic to expect 20% of them to find the time to camp out.
Never underestimate the depths that anonymous internet trolls will plunge. I’m in agreement with the sentiment that Duke men’s basketball is too overexposed and exhalted (I went to UMD and was a ground zero of that backlash as an undergrad from 1999-2003) but I never talk smack about the academic qualities of the institution.
My own writing (see link in my handle) has taught me to never be shocked by any garbage from any internet troll. Trolling is the early 21st century’s contribution to humanity for posterity.