Last April, Duke made its first Final Four appearance since 2004 on its way to a fourth national championship. There had been a good amount of talk regarding how Duke may have “saved” the Final Four from a ratings standpoint. Indeed, Duke has one of the largest fanbases nationally of any college basketball team and was thus a big draw for CBS.

However, CBS saw a true spike in the ratings from the legions of fans rooting against Duke.

Honestly, why shouldn’t you be one of them? Why would anyone want to see this band of overhyped elitist brats from Durham win anything? It’s not as if they haven’t before, right?

In my years as a Duke fan, from starting to follow the Blue Devils casually in high school when I knew I wanted to attend college at Duke to cheering them from afar as an alumnus, I’ve found that Duke haters use the same core group of arguments to build a case against college hoops’ “evil empire.”

I also noticed that most of their arguments, as the song goes, stood upon pillars of sand.

Here are the most common grievances Duke haters have, and why you, the fan who dislikes Duke because of what your ill-informed buddy told you, shouldn’t buy into them.

“Duke doesn’t play fair. Krzyzewski yells at the refs constantly, they get all the calls, and their players are a bunch of floppers!”

Sure, Coach K works the officials. Anyone who watches Duke basketball on a semi-regular basis on TV will see that this is an undeniable fact. However, I’d like to challenge all of you to watch any other college basketball game at any time and pay close attention to the head coaches. All of them will be doing the same thing.

I have seen Seth Greenberg of Virginia Tech, for example, lose his cool far more often than Mike Krzyzewski. “Sweat, Gary, Sweat” has also become a favored cheer of the Cameron Crazies when Maryland visits Durham, as the Terrapins’ head coach, Gary Williams, has become known for his animated sideline persona.

Coach K was called for a technical during the ACC Tournament last season in a game against the University of Miami. It was his first technical since 2003, which was perfect fodder for the “Duke gets all the calls” camp. However, numbers do not lie, and having a simple look at the numbers says otherwise.

In fact, last season, Duke was called for just 1.4 fewer fouls than its opponents per game, certainly not a large enough difference to justify this argument. Favorable officiating also did not help the Blue Devils in the past few NCAA Tournaments, as Duke was bounced by mid-major Virginia Commonwealth in the first round in 2007 and kept out of the Sweet Sixteen again the following year.

As for the flopping claim, I’ll use the same reasoning I did to address the complaints about Coach K. Tune in to any game, and you will see nearly every team employing this tactic to draw fouls. Personally, I do not like the embellishment of fouls to draw a call.

I’m a hockey fan, and the NHL provides for penalties to players that “dive” in order to send an opponent to the penalty box. However, for now, use of tactics such as flopping is a part of the game, and has yet to be made illegal. I cannot fault Duke, or any other team, for trying to use the embellishment of calls to their advantage. The same can be said of Jon Scheyer’s knack for drawing fouls on jump shots last season.

“Okay, fine, maybe Duke doesn’t cheat on the court, but what about off of it? They don’t run the clean program everyone says they do!”

Most Duke haters will claim the well-publicized Corey Maggette scandal as evidence that Duke plays dirtier than it would care to admit. Maggette (now a star in the NBA) was receiving payments from AAU coach Myron Piggie during his high school basketball career. Maggette later signed with Duke. Some time afterwards, his involvement with Piggie became known and the NCAA launched an investigation.

Duke haters are quick to point out that even though Maggette admitted to taking the payments while in high school, the NCAA did not impose any formal sanction upon Duke. A sign of preferential treatment, right?

Wrong. The NCAA found that Duke had no knowledge of the Piggie incident while it was recruiting Maggette. So, to the Duke haters, I ask this: Why should Duke have to be punished for wrongdoing by one of its players that the school didn’t even know about?

Another point Duke haters will mention is the perception that Duke basketball players are “true” student-athletes, a notion advanced by certain media figures such as Dick Vitale. Why would everyone think that Duke basketball players are so much more academically capable than players at other schools?

My argument is not about whether the academic standards that Duke holds its basketball players to are superior or inferior to any other school. The argument is about whether Duke basketball players are capable student-athletes.

A quick look at the biographies of Duke’s players from last season will turn up National Honor Society members, salutatorians, and honor students. These were not reflective of just the benchwarmers, either; these were the resumes of players in Duke’s main rotation.

These facts are not presented here to show that Duke is “better.” Rather, they are shown to point out that Duke does not play “dirty” when it comes to holding its athletes to reasonable academic standards.

Duke basketball also had an 89 percent graduation rate for players who enrolled from 1998-2001, while the national average was only 62 percent.

Finally, everyone remembers the infamous Christian Laettner chest stomp. While this was obviously an unacceptable act, college basketball’s history has been riddled with ugly and sometimes violent on-court incidents.

Although Laettner wasn’t the most likeable person on the court, neither were many of the others who took a cheap shot at an opposing player. I pose this question to you: What makes Duke so much more worthy of hatred than any other school that had a player that did something like this on the court?

“Well, maybe the basketball program isn't that bad. But what about the school itself? The Cameron Crazies are a bunch of trust-fund nerds who know nothing about basketball and have to use scripted cheers! It’s just a place for rich, stuck-up white kids—and Duke seems to have nothing but pale, goofy white players every season!”

Duke has been called “the Harvard of the South,” which brings up connotations of elitism and general pompousness just as much as it does of intellectualism and high academic standards.

Criticism has been leveled at Duke by many fans as being an elitist, “lilywhite” school. However, as was the case with the foul differential, simple numbers say otherwise. Only about 50 percent of the student body at Duke is actually white. Likewise, around 40 percent are on some form of financial aid, as I was when I was at Duke.

I was a minority student who came from a working-class family from rural North Carolina; I can honestly say I never felt like I was some sort of outcast among a bunch of “rich white kids” during my four years in Durham.

Dukies are also stereotyped as being transplants from the Northeast, much to the ire of UNC fans. However, a typical incoming class at Duke has an even spread of students from across the nation, including nearly 40 percent from the South, 10 percent from the Midwest, and 14 percent from the West.

I knew my share of classmates from wealthier backgrounds at Duke—certainly, that demographic does exist. However, I found most of them to be rather down-to-earth and humble, and some of them remain my very best friends to this day.

Obviously, it was a rare occurrence that I missed a Duke game in Cameron Indoor. I was exposed first-hand to all the myths; the cheer sheets, the supposed basketball ineptitude amongst the fans, the general nerdiness.

Something I’ve grown to realize in 22 years of life is that people are basically the same everywhere. Duke was no exception. All of the Dukies I encountered were a little bit bookish as a product of being accepted to the highest-ranked university in the South. Nevertheless, I recall a diverse mix of students during those cold winter nights outside of Cameron: the ultra-suave, the average Joes, and yes, a few nerds—just as one would find at any other school.

The talk in line was not dominated by how best to get on TV or struggling to remember our players’ names; we discussed back-door cuts, ball screens, NCAA Tournament seedings, and what we needed to do to win that night’s game.

The cheer sheets were actually quite different from “scripts.” Basically, a cheer sheet contained Duke’s roster, information about the players that might be relevant (for example, if there was a birthday or a family member in the crowd), the opponent’s roster, and any information (usually related to basketball, academics, or a humorous Internet post) that we could use to taunt them.

The few cheers that were listed on the sheets were suggestions made by other Duke students; Duke haters often act as if Duke’s English professors wrote the cheers and then led us through them as if we were too dimwitted to think of the cheers ourselves. Even so, I can say with all honesty that we rarely used the cheers and usually adopted more of a “make it up as we go along” style.

Cheer sheets were abolished for 2009-10, and last season’s Crazies were, well, crazier and more enthusiastic than any of the groups in recent memory.

Duke haters also like to point out Elton Brand’s response to an e-mail a student sent him after he announced he was leaving Duke early to test the NBA waters. The student’s e-mail was rather ill-mannered and criticized Brand for leaving Duke. Brand sent a scathing reply (which has since been made public) in which he called Duke students “posh yuppies.” Brand pointed out that his decision was brought on by a desire to ensure a secure financial future for both himself and his family.

Obviously, Brand had a right to be upset. However, anyone that would base their perception of Duke on one student who exhibited poor judgment and something that Elton Brand typed in anger is suffering from severe myopia. If you’re a Duke hater, do you really believe that no other college has a single student that would respond in an immature way if one of their favorite players left school early?

Speaking of the perception of “posh yuppies,” Duke has had a good number of white players come through the recruiting pipeline recently. Last season’s Final Four squad had a nine-man rotation; six of those players were white, an anomaly for a program that does as well as Duke.

However, it would be folly to read into this. Duke has had plenty of predominantly black rosters in the past; the 2001 championship team featured black stars such as Carlos Boozer, Nate James, Chris Duhon, Jason Williams, and Shane Battier. Additionally, this season's incoming class of four solely consists of black players.

Even so, Duke’s white players remain targets. Curiously, many of those who claim to hate Duke because of their “goofy, pasty white guys” are also white themselves.

If I asked you to compose a “Most Hated Dukies” list, these four guys would likely be at the top: Art Heyman, Christian Laettner, J.J. Redick, and Greg Paulus. It’s no coincidence that all four of them are white. Why is it that so many people, whites included, take shots at Duke’s white players?

The answer is quite simple: They can get away with it.

Physical appearance is the first thing that anyone notices about a fellow human being, and is also one of the easiest things to ridicule. Duke has had a few players whose race has enabled them to become targets; in today’s society, ridiculing whites for their appearance has somehow become socially acceptable.

Have you noticed how Nolan Smith, Lance Thomas, and Andre Dawkins never hear it from opposing fans? No one wants to be labeled a racist for taunting a black player.

Duke haters have exploited this double-standard for a long time. Even if a particular Duke hater is white, he or she knows that it is socially acceptable to call Kyle Singler “pasty,” and will do so.

Insults beyond appearance are also far more commonly directed at Duke’s white players; if the fans at the University of Maryland want to yell out “F*** you, J.J.”, “F*** you, Paulus”, or “F*** you, Scheyer”, who would accuse them of being racist? The double standard strikes yet again; these chants were never turned against black players like Nolan Smith, as I previously mentioned.

Although few will feel pity for Duke due to the Blue Devils’ success on the court, Duke has certainly caught far more vitriol than any other college basketball program in recent memory. Hatred of Duke has become a near-religious experience in college basketball; it’s natural for any successful program to endure some ribbing or resentment, but it’s very telling when Maryland students can rain down chants of “F*** Duke” at the Comcast Center, repeatedly and en masse, and the entire college basketball world turns a blind eye. Usually, this kind of behavior would draw quite the reprimand, but directing it at Duke somehow makes it acceptable.

The truth of the matter is that Duke has been despised for the wrong reasons for far too long. What exists in Durham is not a conspiracy or elitism; there is merely a well-managed, successful basketball program, not unlike whichever school you call your own.

"But they win all the time!"

I can't argue with that one.

Go Duke.