Nina King has quietly built Duke into a force across the sports that drive college athletics, and the results are hard to ignore.
The Blue Devils have been rolling under King’s watch since she stepped up from within to become athletic director after serving as Kevin White’s senior deputy director. White had brought her over from Notre Dame in 2008, and once he retired, King took the reins. Since then, Duke has kept climbing in all six revenue sports.
That rise showed up again in Cody Nagel’s latest CBS Sports ranking of which Power Four schools had the best academic year in 2025-26. Duke wasn’t at the very top of the list, but it still landed comfortably inside the top 20 and more than held its own. The Blue Devils won ACC championships in football, men’s basketball, and women’s basketball over the past year, and that kind of across-the-board success stood out.
Nagel used a points system to measure the year, with rewards assigned for milestones ranging from bowl eligibility and NCAA Tournament appearances all the way up to national titles. The breakdown looked like this:
Bowl eligible/NCAA Tournament appearance: 20 points
Bowl win/Round of 32/Regional Finals: 30 points
CFP appearance/Sweet 16/Super Regionals: 45 points
CFP quarterfinals/Elite Eight/CWS: 60 points
CFP semifinals/Final Four/CWS semifinals: 75 points
National runner-up: 90 points
National champion: 100 points
Using that scale, Duke checked in at No. 17 nationally with 40.93 points. Texas led the way at 66.73, followed by Alabama, Michigan, Texas A&M, Nebraska, UCLA, Oklahoma, Georgia, Tennessee, Miami, Texas Tech, Ole Miss, TCU, North Carolina, Kentucky, Louisville, Duke, Oregon, Indiana, and Arizona State.
In the ACC, Duke sat squarely in the middle of the pack at No. 4.
Miami was first among league schools at No. 10 overall, followed by North Carolina at No. 14, Louisville at No.
16, Duke at No. 17, and Virginia at No. 21.
There’s an argument that Duke’s year was even stronger than the ranking gave it credit for. Across the six major revenue sports - football, men’s basketball, women’s basketball, baseball, softball, and volleyball - the Blue Devils won conference titles in three of them. And under the current College Football Playoff setup, Duke would have been in the field last season.
That’s the larger story here: Duke isn’t just stacking wins in one sport. It’s operating at a high level in the sports that matter most, and it’s doing it while staying in the same conversation with Miami, North Carolina, Louisville, and Virginia in the ACC.
A big reason is the stability and quality of the coaching hires King has made. Manny Diaz in football.
Jon Scheyer in men’s basketball. Kara Lawson in women’s basketball.
That’s a strong trio, and it points to an athletic director who knows how to set the tone.
Scheyer had his dream job waiting when he replaced Mike Krzyzewski, but there were other possibilities out there, including interest from the Dallas Mavericks. King still played a part in keeping him in Durham.
Lawson has kept pushing the women’s program forward. Diaz arrived after Mike Elko left the football team in better shape than he found it before returning to Texas A&M, but Duke still had to make the right move to land Diaz, who came over from Penn State.
King also had to navigate major transitions beyond those hires. Coach K retired on her watch, and Duke moved on from David Cutcliffe, its most successful and loyal head football coach. On the baseball side, she replaced Chris Pollard as well.
Even with the baseball team missing the NCAA Tournament this year, Duke is in the middle of its best decade as a program. That stretch has been shaped heavily by King.
A’s hire A’s, and B’s hire C’s. King is an A at her job every step of the way.
In Other News...
Manny Diazs Rise At Duke Could Create A Familiar Fear
Manny Diaz has spent enough time around the Duke program to make the Blue Devils think bigger about whats possible, and his rise is starting to feel familiar in a way that should make the fan base a little uneasy. Duke brought him in with the hope that he could stabilize and elevate the program, and instead he has delivered a run that has put the Blue Devils in the ACC title conversation and turned his name into the kind of one coaches see attached to bigger jobs.
That sort of success is good news for Duke and the kind of development athletic director Nina King wanted to support, but it also comes with the old college-football catch. When a coach starts to look like a fast riser, other schools notice, and keeping him usually becomes a matter of matching ambition with resources. The question around Duke is no longer whether Diaz can win there, but how long the Blue Devils can keep a coach whose stock seems to be climbing every time the season gets louder. [Read more 🡒]
John Blackwell Could Put Duke On The Verge Of Something Historic
John Blackwells arrival from Wisconsin has already given Duke another high-end name to track as the Blue Devils reload around one of the sports most demanding standards. The guard is drawing big expectations before ever suiting up in Durham, and DraftKings has slotted him with the third-best odds to win the Wooden Award, a sign of how quickly his profile has risen since the transfer became official.
Duke knows what this territory looks like better than most programs, with recent winners Cooper Flagg in 2025 and Cameron Boozer in 2026 adding to a lineage that also includes Shane Battier and Jay Williams. Blackwells path is more complicated, though, because he is being projected as the teams leading scorer on a roster that should be deep and balanced, which means every big outing will have to compete with a lot of other mouths to feed. [Read more 🡒]
Duke May Have Just Avoided A Future Backcourt Nightmare
The NCAAs new age-based eligibility model could end up giving Duke a little more breathing room in the backcourt, and that matters more than it might first sound. Under the new 5-for-5 rule, Division I athletes get five years to play five seasons, with the clock starting at college enrollment or age 19, whichever comes first. For a program that is always trying to balance immediate title hopes with what comes next, that kind of change can reshape roster planning in a hurry.
Caleb Foster and John Blackwell are the kinds of guards who make the ripple effects obvious. Foster brings the kind of perimeter defense and steady decision-making that coaches trust, while Blackwell has the sort of scoring upside that can change the tone of a lineup. Before this ruling, Duke could have been staring at a future where the backcourt thinned out fast after the 2026-27 season. Now there is at least a path for the Blue Devils to keep more of that guard core intact, even if the full implications are still working their way through the sport. [Read more 🡒]