Facebook.com has made me a very happy man.

It has given me the CBSSports.com Official Tournament Brackets, and with it a ranking of which school have the most fans and most enemies. 

It has given support to one of my favorite arguments about college hoops:

Everyone hates Duke. Kind of.

As of 6:55 on Wednesday night, here are Facebook's CBS Standings for the Favorite and Most Despised teams:

Favorite:
1.) Duke Blue Devils, 1,445 Fans
2.) UNC Tar Heels, 1,420 Fans
3.) Kansas Jayhawks, 800 Fans
4.) Indiana Hoosiers, 599 Fans
5.) Kentucky Wildcats, 574 Fans

Despised:
1.) Duke Blue Devils, 3,357 Haters
2.) UNC Tar Heels, 1,522 Haters
3.) Florida Gators, 535 Haters
4.) Indiana Hoosiers, 389 Haters
5.) Ohio State Buckeyes, 371 Haters

Over 3,500 people say, "The team I hate most is Duke."

Do I hate Duke?  No, I can't say I do. That spot is safely reserved in the depths of my soul for Georgetown and UConn. 

I even support Duke upon occasion, because their junior point guard, Greg Paulus, played his high school ball for Christian Brothers Academy in Syracuse. I support Section 3 (NYSPHSAA Central New York Region) guys all I can. 

But let me say this: if I grew up in ACC Country, I would certainly understand the feeling. Here's why:

Duke, a small school in North Carolina, used to be known as Brown School, then Union Institute, then Normal College, then Trinity College back when it was founded by the Quakers and Methodists of the area. They moved from Trinity to Durham in 1892, and changed the name of the schools to Duke University in 1924 in honor of an endowment given by tobacco colossus James B. Duke in the name of his father, Washington Duke.

(Thanks, Wikipedia, for the details. Call me out if you need to, I trust it enough for government work.)

So where is the harm here? To the uninformed majority, it's the pretension.

"What school could possibly have the audacity to call themselves Duke University" is not an uncommon sentiment. 

Another could be its history as a program. Few know that Duke sported a relatively weak basketball team until the 1970s. 

Don't believe me?  Look up a book called Forever's Team, by master sportswriter John Feinstein.  The name "Spanarkel" will instantly leave you with memories of a matured Jimmy Chitwood.

But here's the point: America knew relatively little about Duke until the (arguably) greatest sportswriter in America wrote about them. 

Granted, it's an excellent book, but let's be real—if he had written a book about the exploits of a school like San Diego State or Marist College, the world may have been a different place.

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