Given that they set up a "venture capital" firm to pay recruits back in the day, trench coats and fake mustaches wouldn't surprise me either... 🥸
A little history lesson for folks. Duke has paid players for ever, most programs have, golden hand shakes, the free dinners, the girls, ect, just comes with it all. But when it really took a bad turn was back when the NBA put in the 1 year of college deal, the game changed right there. See Calipari, who I consider to be the king of sleeze figured out that he could have players paid to play for him and not be "personally" involved, he got his buddy WWW to do it with Nike money. This allowed Cal to be hand delivered basically any player he wanted and be a degree of separation between he and the $$$. The NCAA knew all about it, didn't do anything to stop it, they fear that Ky fan base for how huge and vocal it is so the NCAA looked the other way.
K saw this, K saw Cal dominating the top 10 players coming out of high school, realized the NCAA was looking the other way so a few of the iron dukes formed their own LLC and funneled the money for K to be able to do the same thing as WWW was doing for Ky. All the sudden it was duke and Ky owning the top 10 recruits, that is where the real difference making players are, top 10 coming from high school. Of course you are going to win at extremely high levels, of course you are going to put more players in the NBA when you get your pick of multiple top 10 kids coming from high school. Let's see, as a 18yr old whatam I going to do, play for UNC for maybe the occasional $50 hand shake or duke where they will drop $100,000 cash in my hands and all I have to do is play for them? LOL It is the very same thing John Wooden did and he was worshipped as a coach. I guess after 20 some years of practice programs like duke and Ky got pretty darn good at it, it was old hat for them when NIL came along. You know how it is, if you ain't cheatin ya ain't tryin...Duke has been trying for a long long time!
