Duke-Yale Is An Underdog Battle, Whether You Like It Or Not

This feature is part of VICE Sports' March Madness coverage.

Years ago, back when I was younger and at least slightly less cynical, I spent a season following the Columbia men's basketball program for a series of newspaper stories about a new coach's attempt to build a moribund program into a competitor. Columbia, frankly, did not have a very talented basketball team, and the school has little to no athletic tradition—at least in the revenue sports of men's basketball and football—despite being situated in New York City, where basketball has long been a way of life. The coach of that Columbia team, Joe Jones, knew he was in for a challenge. And he tried. But I don't think he could ever quite get beyond the frustrating reality that basketball was never going to galvanize the university community the way he thought it could.

Jones lasted seven seasons at Columbia before moving on to become the coach at Boston University. On Thursday, Joe's brother James, the longtime coach at Yale, upset Baylor in the first round of the NCAA tournament. This sets up a second-round matchup in the Entitlement and Privilege Region between Duke and Yale, which immediately and predictably sent Twitter scrambling to an escalating series of pointed one-liners about Whiffenpoofs and Montgomery Burns and Steve Wojciechowski.

That's perfectly understandable, given the place of Duke and Yale in the larger world. It's understandable given that Duke has carved a niche for itself as America's most hateable college basketball team, a hatred that appears to be peaking now that the Blue Devils' most loathsome current player, Grayson Allen, is a Frankenstein's monster combining the punchable countenance of a young Ted Cruz with the most obnoxious traits of every annoying Duke player who came before him. I can't blame you for rooting against either of these teams, or wishing a plague upon both of them. But in the midst of all that hatred, I hope you can also acknowledge that we are witnessing something kind of miraculous and overwhelmingly Democratic, something that reminds us that college basketball—if you can, for a moment, allow yourself to appreciate the sport in a vacuum all its own—is the closest thing we have to a socialistic athletic enterprise. (Except for the players, for whom it's more like serfdom). Forget about the schools and what they represent. Because both these teams are underdogs, whether you like it or not.

I mean, say what you want about Yale as an overarching oligarchic influence on, say, politics and the judiciary system, dude, but in the Ivy League, athletics are a far different deal. I saw this first-hand while spending that season with Columbia; the gyms are tiny, and the fan bases miniscule. In recent years, Harvard's Tommy Amaker has been able to lure some high-profile recruits, but it is still not easy to win a league that has long had no conference tournament to offer hope for a team that finishes in second place (that will change soon, which is both potentially good for the Ivy's democratization and potentially bad for a league that often seemed set apart from the rest of college basketball).

This is partly why it took James Jones 15 years of coaching at Yale to get his team into the NCAA tournament, and why Yale hadn't been to an NCAA tournament since 1962: Because it's not easy to build a perennially good team under any circumstances, let alone in the Ivy League. (I will note here that Columbia won 22 games this year and finished third in the Ivy, which should probably earn current Columbia coach Kyle Smith serious consideration for a Nobel Prize.)

And you know what? You can say some of the same things about Duke.

Here's the thing that gets forgotten: When Mike Krzyzewski took over at Duke in 1980, the Blue Devils did not possess any sort of overarching iconography. They'd had a few good seasons under Bill Foster, but the job was not a sure thing. The university was seeking to reinvent itself, to brand as something other than a school for "affluent, southern white kids," wrote Timothy Bella in The Atlantic. But Krzyzewski went 38-47 during his first three seasons; it took time to find the proper combination that would transform Duke into a perennial power (and as someone who went to a historically disastrous basketball school, I understand how difficult that can be).

That Duke combination, as Chuck Klosterman pointed out a few years back, is inherently paradoxical: Duke rarely has the best players, but they often have the best team. There is something remarkable about that. There is something about it that reflects the ideal of what college sports are supposed to be: Imperfect and flawed, and therefore beautiful by virtue of those imperfections and flaws.

This doesn't mean you have to go as far as Klosterman does and actually root for Duke. It doesn't mean you have to root for Yale, either. In a way, the hissy fits that will ensue over this game are perfectly justified. But in another way, this is sports, and as much as sports inevitably wind up colliding with the very serious issues of real life on a college campus, the games themselves deserve to be set apart. And in the world of college basketball, Duke-Yale is a game between two schools that probably shouldn't be here. That doesn't have to thrill you, but you should at least appreciate the fact that it almost certainly didn't come as easily as you'd like to think it did.