Turns out that Duke was caught cheating – twice.

The Duke Basketball Report is a fine publication that has existed long before the Internet was invented by whomever. During the early digital days, the DBR was purchased by SB Nation in the giant game of Packman that those big national websites played for years.

J.D. King is an excellent writer who has been with the Duke Basketball Report forever, and he really knows his stuff about the Blue Devils and anyone who has anything to do with them. My only beef with King is that he quite frequently refers to Carolina as UNC-Cheat, obviously referring to the NCAA probe that resulted in no penalties for Tar Heel athletics.

UNC-Cheat for a school that was not caught cheating?

I hope by this time King has read about the 112.5 million dollars that Duke has agreed to pay the government for complicity in a funding scam that has gone on since 2006. The university was caught violating the False Claims Act for submitting applications and progress reports that contained falsified research on federal grant applications to the NIH and the EPA.

The settlement resolves allegations that for 12 years before 2018, Duke knowingly submitted and caused to be submitted claims in 30 grants that contained falsified or fabricated data or statements, allowing Duke grant money it otherwise would not have received. And this was the second such grant scandal Duke has had since 2006.  Hmmm.

A former Duke employee named Joseph Thomas knew what was going on and filed a lawsuit under the whistleblower provisions of the False Claims Act, which permits private individuals to sue on behalf of the government and share in any recovery. So Mr. Thomas will be awarded $33,750,000, which is about one-third of Duke’s penalty.

Not a bad day’s work for Mr. Thomas, who must feel like he hit the lottery for good reason. This was all buried in news reports dwarfed by Duke’s basketball team during March Madness. But I certainly hope J.D. King read and knows about the story.

I wouldn’t want King to come up with some clever nickname for his school, like Dirty Duke. But, once and for all, I would like him to lose the UNC-Cheat line. What do you say, J.D.?