Will Avery is going back to Duke to, ahem, get his degree.
The Dukie bloggers must be running out of material. Almost every day, they write about some 5-star one and done Coach K is getting, followed the next day by, oh my god, what will happen if Duke doesn’t sign some 3-and-4-stars and another entire class leaves (without again winning the national championship, I might add).
Last Saturday morning, one of the biggest Duke blogging stories broke: former two-year guard Will Avery, at 40 years old, announced he was going back to school to get his degree. So that non-story begs a thousand questions, but I will only ask a few.
Will Avery take the two, if not three, years of classes he needs to graduate at Duke or at another school, like Durham Tech or N.C. Central? I only ask this because athletes over there have taken all kinds of courses – from correspondence, to JUCO classes, to accelerated high school classes to either get in Duke or stay in.
If Avery does take those classes in Durham, will they all be labeled Sociology Something, since even the News & Observer reported recently that the “soche” major at Duke is the ticket for athletes who are under prepared or unwilling to study. And Avery, at least back in the day, was pretty much both.
Coaches at other schools, who thought about recruiting Avery and looked at his academic record, knew THEY couldn’t get the talented point guard in — and were flabbergasted that Duke took him and he actually stayed eligible for two years after which Coach K wanted him to play a third season and was miffed he did not.
The Blue Devils were short point guards on the 2000 roster, and Avery apparently told K he would return for his junior season and was obviously eligible to do so; because when Avery changed his mind and decided to turn pro Coach K was p-i-s-s-e-d. He lashed out at both Avery and his mother, and it wasn’t pretty. All public record.
So now it’s a big story that Avery is coming back to make up all those credits because he wants to be a coach and knows he needs a degree, and he thinks he is getting one from Duke. Where has he been for the last eight years? He retired from a career in Europe in 2011, playing for 12 different teams, after the former first-round draft pick washed out of the NBA following just three seasons in Minnesota?
Get your book bag, Will, Sociology 101 awaits you.
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