Duke’s 2025-26 athletic year came with a little bit of everything: championship banners, deep postseason runs, elite individual honors and a pile of academic wins to match. The Blue Devils’ annual report paints a season that reached far beyond one sport, with 20 teams showing up in NCAA Championship postseason play and a program-wide footprint that was hard to miss.
The headline moment came in the ACC, where Duke did something no school in conference history had done before. In the same academic year, the Blue Devils won league championships in football and both men’s and women’s basketball.
Football opened the stretch with a 27-20 win over Virginia. The women followed with a 70-65 overtime victory against Louisville to repeat as champions, and the men finished the sweep a week later by edging Virginia, 74-70.
That gave Jon Scheyer his second straight ACC Tournament title and third overall in four seasons, while Kara Lawson was named ACC Coach of the Year after steering Duke to both the regular-season and tournament crowns. Manny Diaz, meanwhile, posted his second consecutive nine-win season.
Duke’s men’s fencing team also added hardware, winning its third ACC Fencing Championship with a winner-take-all fence-off against Boston College.
The postseason was crowded with Duke logos. Football reached the Tony the Tiger Sun Bowl, while men’s lacrosse and women’s soccer both advanced to the NCAA semifinals.
Men’s and women’s basketball each made it to the Elite Eight. Women’s soccer, under first-year head coach Kieran Hall, finished 17-5-1 and got all the way to the NCAA College Cup before falling 1-0 to Stanford in the semifinals.
Kat Rader and Mia Ministrella were named United Soccer Coaches All-Americans. Men’s lacrosse went from unseeded to fourth in the national rankings and ended its run on the final weekend of competition.
Aidan Maguire was named the USILA’s Most Outstanding Player of the Year, becoming the first short-stick defensive midfielder to win the award.
On the individual front, Cameron Boozer stacked up one honor after another. The consensus 2026 Men’s Basketball National Player of the Year was chosen as the 2025-26 recipient of the Anthony J.
McKevlin Award as the ACC Male Athlete of the Year, selected by 40 members of the Atlantic Coast Conference media. Boozer became the 18th Duke player to win the award, the most in league history.
He helped lead Duke to the ACC regular-season and tournament titles, a 35-3 record and an NCAA Elite Eight appearance while sweeping ACC Player of the Year and Rookie of the Year honors, earning ACC Tournament MVP and landing as a consensus first-team All-American.
Duke also sent talent into the professional ranks. Eleven players across six sports were drafted, including Aidan Maguire as the No. 1 pick from men’s lacrosse and Cameron Boozer as the No. 3 pick in the 2026 NBA Draft. Nine other Blue Devils signed free agent contracts.
The numbers on the academic side were just as strong. Duke finished 11th in the Learfield Directors’ Cup with 1,039.25 points, fueled by semifinal runs from women’s soccer and men’s lacrosse, each worth 83 points.
Women’s basketball and men’s basketball added 73 apiece, while women’s golf posted 72.75, men’s fencing 72, field hockey 65, softball 64, women’s tennis 64, men’s soccer 64 and men’s golf 63. Additional point-scoring teams included women’s fencing, women’s swimming and diving, women’s outdoor track and field, football, women’s indoor track and field, men’s tennis and men’s wrestling.
Duke’s academic profile stayed loaded as well. The NCAA Graduation Success Rate data showed 97 percent of Duke freshmen student-athletes receiving scholarship aid, or recruited individuals competing in non-scholarship programs, graduated within six years. Eighteen of 23 Duke programs posted a perfect 100 percent GSR for the 2015-18 cohort.
The Blue Devils also stacked up on APR and honor roll recognition. Fourteen varsity programs earned perfect 1000 scores in the most recent multi-year APR data, and Duke had the highest APR among ACC schools in 16 sports.
The Blue Devils ranked second in the conference with 14 perfect-score programs, behind Notre Dame’s 17. Duke also placed 654 student-athletes on the 2025-26 ACC Academic Honor Roll, with more than 87 percent of enrolled student-athletes earning the distinction.
Ten Blue Devils made the Honor Roll for the fifth time.
Charlie Johnson of men’s lacrosse and Sydney Smith of women’s lacrosse both earned ACC Postgraduate scholarships through the Weaver-James-Corrigan-Swofford Postgraduate Scholarship Award, receiving $6,000 each for graduate study. Aidan Maguire and Andie Smith were also among 33 student-athletes named to the ACC Excellence Award list.
By the final accounting, Duke’s 2025-26 report included 20 NCAA Championship teams, 44 All-America award winners, 3 ACC Scholar-Athletes of the Year, 18 teams with a perfect 100 percent GSR, 654 ACC Honor Roll selections, 98 All-ACC award winners, 11 drafted Blue Devils, 14 perfect APR teams, 3 first-round picks in pro sports drafts, 4 ACC championships and a 97 percent Graduation Success Rate.
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