Duke is one of the most hated schools in college basketball. There’s been a growing dislike against the Blue Devils and the white players they have. Think back to Michigan’s Fab 5 against Duke and it’s pitted as black underprivileged players trying to make it against white privileged players. JJ Redick, who at one time was a controversial Duke player, opened his podcast posted on Monday with a discussion about the allegations of Grayson Allen being a dirty player. He questioned why there’s always someone that we as a whole insist on disliking on the Blue Devils every year.
via FTW:
” I think it’s fine for an opposing fan base to choose a player to root against or maybe you dislike certain guys, my issue though is I think the media has perpetuated this white Duke villain myth as much as anyone. Grayson is one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met, Jon Scheyer is one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met — never seen Jon Scheyer do anything dirty. Greg Paulus, one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met … And you know me too, I probably in a way brought on some of the animosity towards me with the antics, the smiling, the head-bobbing, the trash-talking, but to be honest with you, it was more in reaction to the hate that was already coming my way before I ever really did anything to warrant it. It’s almost like every time there’s a player at Duke, the media says ‘oh, you should dislike this guy’. I can remember being in school my senior year, Greg Paulus was a freshman, and there were numerous articles that year, ‘Greg Paulus is the next hated Duke player’.
“So the media I guess was choosing who we should hate. The media was saying like ‘this guy is the next guy’. And then the following year or the year after, whenever it was, it was Jon Scheyer — ‘he’s the guy you’re supposed to dislike’. And now recently there was an article in ESPN, and to be honest with you I participated in the interview and in the process of Dana O’Neil writing the article, and I thought the article was, it is what it is. She didn’t seem to kind of go off the rails against Duke or wasn’t as anti-Duke as some people might think it is. But she kinda said the same thing, like ‘now we’re supposed to dislike Grayson Allen — he’s the next in line’. Why though, why? Why does there have to be a next in line?
