Quote Originally Posted by Channing View Post
Thank you. Given the refrain over the last 2 or 3 years one would think Duke's prominence in Academics is new. I don't know what the school was like in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, but late 90s and early 00s, when I was there, had the school with a top 5 ranking (I think) and a minuscule acceptance ratio. We all had heavy course loads and other commitments and, guess what, we didn't even have WiFi, smart phones, or tablets. Later in my Duke career I think they wired the lamp posts in KVille with ethernet jacks, though, if you wanted to use a laptop in KVille. And, I only go back a decade or so, people going back further had even less technology.

Its reasonable to say that today's Duke students just aren't as interested in basketball as past students, but to act like today's students are somehow more burdened or have greater time commitments is pretty misguided.
Being highly connected may be part of the issue. In the 1980s and earlier, if you wanted to know the score of the game you had to attend the game. I remember having to do a computer science project one night when Duke was playing Clemson. It was very difficult to concentrate not knowing the score so I decided that I would go to the game and then pull an all-nighter. Vince Taylor had a career game and Duke won in 3-OT. I made a good choice.