Manny Diaz didn’t sound like a coach enjoying a comfortable start to the week. He sounded like somebody staring straight at where college football is headed and liking what he sees less and less.
That matters because Diaz has a pretty good feel for the whole picture. At Duke, he’s just come off back-to-back nine-win seasons in 2024 and 2025, with an ACC Championship last year, and the Blue Devils are 4-1 heading into this weekend’s game against North Carolina.
So when he talks, it’s not from the edge of the sport. He’s right in the middle of it.
On the Andy & Ari show with Andy Staples and Ari Wasserman earlier this week, Diaz was asked, “What is bothering you?” That opened the door for a long answer about the direction of college football and college athletics, and he didn’t hold back.
“There are very few unregulated economic models in sports," Diaz said. "One of them is playing their championship series right now (Major League Baseball), and everyone knows they're about to go into a knockdown, drag-out fight over the future of that game.
"Everyone knows communism sucks, right? It’s really, really bad, and it’s pretty proven through the annals of history.
We were kind of sort of a communist state in the NCAA for a long time, but unfettered, unregulated capitalism has its downside as well. The common theme is just greed in both.
What we’re doing right now, if we don’t have some way to control it, is not good. This is not a 'can the university sustain this?'
I don’t think this is really good for our fanbase, and I think we’re taking a lot of liberties. We’re not a professional sports team.
The people who pay their hard-earned, the people who pay for the parking, the tailgate, to come to games. Ultimately, the cost always goes to the consumer.
Always. Any economics, first day of class, they’re gonna teach you that.
"The things that are happening that changed the sport are good for the sport, but if we don’t get some sort of regulation on it, we are going to ruin this. And I don’t want to hear about how good TV ratings are now, or someone had a great day, or someone stormed the field because one game was awesome.
That is all literally short-term stuff. If we don’t get this corrected, we’re gonna be wishing we had what we had because it’s a damn good thing.
And the product is good, but there have been better things that have been ruined by greed before, and this is going down that road.”
Diaz’s warning lands even harder when you look at what’s already happening around the sport. The College Football Playoff is reportedly set to expand to 24 teams starting in 2027, just three years into the 12-team era.
That move is widely unpopular with a lot of fans, but the money side of the equation is hard to ignore. More teams means more revenue, and that’s the pressure driving so many of these decisions.
It would be easy to brush Diaz off as a coach venting after dealing with the realities of roster movement, including Darian Mensah’s transfer this past offseason. But that misses the point of what he was saying.
His criticism wasn’t really about one player or even one program’s situation. It was about where the sport is drifting overall.
College sports already have a massive gap between the schools that have and the schools that don’t. That divide is only getting more pronounced, and Diaz made clear that if nothing changes, the end result could be athletic departments having to cut non-revenue sports just to keep up in football and the other money-making programs.
Nobody knows exactly what college sports will look like on the other side of all this. Diaz’s message, though, was simple enough: the sport is still good, but the people running it are pushing it toward a place where that won’t last.
In Other News...
Duke Loss Now Overshadowed By Kimari Robinson Sideline Backlash
A brief sideline moment during Dukes game has ended up drawing more attention than the final score, after cornerback Kimari Robinson swatted the arm of a female athletic trainer who was attending to injured teammate Landan Callahan. The interaction was quick, but it was enough to set off a wave of criticism from fans on social media and add an unwelcome layer to a night already shaped by the loss.
For Duke, the bigger issue now is less about the play on the field than what happens next. It remains unclear whether Robinson will face any disciplinary action from the school, leaving the incident hanging over the program as observers wait to see how seriously it will be handled. [Read more 🡒]
Duke Rivalry Game Sparked A Kimari Robinson Debate The Program Can't Ignore
The moment during Dukes rivalry game against North Carolina was supposed to be about the injury to Dashawn Stone, who needed attention on the field before eventually walking off under his own power. Instead, it became about Kimari Robinson, the Duke defensive back whose reaction as the medical staff rushed in quickly spread online and turned a routine injury stoppage into a much bigger conversation.
What made the clip land so hard was the sight of a female athletic trainer trying to help and getting swatted away, a sequence that drew widespread criticism almost as soon as it surfaced. For a program that plays under a spotlight every time it meets UNC, this is the kind of moment that cant simply be brushed aside, because the replay is now part of the rivalry memory whether Duke wants it there or not. [Read more 🡒]
Duke Let Another North Carolina Shot Slip Away Late
Duke had put itself in position to steal one in a tense rivalry game, climbing back from an early deficit and hanging around deep into the second half before the finish turned on the kind of small errors that tend to decide October games. The Blue Devils never got much margin for error against North Carolina, and a night that featured injuries, lineup shuffling and uneven red-zone work ultimately came down to whether they could clean up the details when it mattered most.
Manny Diaz pointed to the basics afterward, which fit the way this one slipped away. Duke had chances to make the game tilt its way, but the final stop never came and the missed opportunities inside the scoring area left too much undone in a 24-20 loss. For a team trying to build on the resilience it showed early, the lesson was plain enough: the effort was there, but the execution in the closing stretch still has to sharpen. [Read more 🡒]