CAMERON INDOOR STADIUM—Humiliation has been the name of the game for teams daring to make the trip to K-Ville this season, with the Duke men’s team’s coup de grâce ending a record breaking home season. A source from inside the Blue Devils squad has revealed that the Blue Devils may have employed psychological tactics. Besides Duke players’ objective superiority, could this be the key to their success at home? Fluke News investigates.
In the guest changing rooms, the source of complaints immediately became evident: the walls were lined with funhouse mirrors with a plethora of different concavities expertly designed to highlight players’ insecurities.
Armando Baydropped-the-ball, a 3’7” UNC player, said that he has always struggled with insecurities about his height. “When I walked into the changing room and saw that the mirrors made me look another foot shorter, my elementary school bully’s taunting grin flashed through my mind. It was traumatizing.”
Throughout the room there were different types of mirrors to capitalize on various common insecurities. Some expectedly made players look less muscular than usual, but the Duke Psychological Warfare Department (DPWD) had gone a step further, creating mirrors that enlarged the size of the players’ feet whilst warping their heads to be especially short and wide. Yet others made their elbows look especially knobbly. Some even flipped their jersey numbers, leading players to put on the wrong apparel.
A representative from Duke’s Physics Department denied having assigned a midterm problem specifically asking the concavity required for a mirror to shrink a “7’2 ram” by half at a distance of two meters. The DPWD declined to comment, but they did leave a note saying that department positions are only awarded to fans who support the team in “any way necessary.”
These insights lead one to wonder—what else is Duke doing to prove to other teams that they haven’t a chance against the champs?
As we know, every non-Duke player wishes they played for the best college team, with the peppiest fans and the most exquisite colors. To exploit this, LED lighting was specially chosen to make the jerseys of every team appear to be Duke Blue.
BJ Davis, a Duke hopeful, said that deciding between the equally bad schools of Louisville and UNC was tough, but he realized that the UNC blue was much easier to make appear to be Duke Blue in low lighting. “When I walked into the room, I finally saw myself in the vibrant Blue Devil hue, and my spirits rose. After the lights brightened, though, my dream was crushed. It messed with my head all game and I kept turning the ball over to Duke thinking–wishing–I was passing to my own teammates… For a moment I could really see myself on my dream team,” he sighed.
Finally, to add insult to injury, as players exited, they realized that the door to the room stood at an unusually high 85 inches and had a slightly small, non-regulation hoop 40 inches above it. In Gothic Lettering above the hoop it said “Kyrie could. Can you?” leading many players to try–and, of course, fail–to get a single shot.
This was a trend which continued onto the court and throughout the season.