Next up for Duke is Northwestern out of the Big Ten.
Like Duke, Northwestern has always been an academic outlier in its conference. Unlike Duke, at least until recently, it has been fairly competitive in the Big Ten.
It’s somewhat odd actually that it’s been respectable in football but in basketball, which is an easier sport to compete in in many ways, it’s been vastly more difficult.
That’s been the opposite for Duke of course. The Blue Devils have been a solid basketball school for decades. When it was still a very young school Wallace Wade turned it into a football power and that lasted to some extent until the 1960s, but Duke is seen now as a basketball school by pretty much everyone.