Thursday afternoon's biggest college hoops news came from Texas, where five-star center Marques Bolden, the No. 16-ranked player in the 2016 ESPN 100, officially committed to Duke. This was a big deal, for two reasons:
It added yet another immensely talented freshman to Duke's sterling 2016 class, which is led by the top two overall prospects in the country (Harry Giles, Jayson Tatum) and has, alongside All-ACC guard Grayson Allen's return, made the Blue Devils the prohibitive 2016-17 favorites.
Bolden chose Duke over Kentucky.
In other words, Thursday was merely the latest salvo in the ongoing arms race between the sport's two royal bluebloods. For most of John Calipari's tenure in Lexington, the Wildcats were an unchallenged talent-acquisition (and NBA draftee-creation) hegemon. In recent seasons, though, Duke -- most notably in 2014-15, when NBA-bound freshmen led coach Mike Krzyzewski to his fifth national title -- has pulled neck-and-neck with Calipari and his staff.
Seeing as this is 2016 and all, this feud was bound to spill onto the Internet eventually. And so it did a few weeks ago, when five-star 2017 talent Hamidou Diallo innocently detailed the difference between the two schools' pitches:
“Kentucky’s pitch was just the NBA thing,” Diallo told the Louisville Courier-Journal. “Duke’s pitch was if you come to Duke, you’re going to be set for life."
Calipari, as is his wont, responded semi-directly in a blog post on his own website:
“I refuse to go in a home and paint a picture saying things like, ‘If you come with us you’ll be taken care of for the rest of your life by the program and by our alums,’ even though you may only be in school for a year or two,” Calipari wrote. “How preposterous does that sound? What if I say that same thing and the young man decides to transfer for one reason or another? Does that still hold true that we’re going to take care of them the rest of their lives? Our approach is to give them the fishing rod and the lures to help them catch fish, not to just give you the fish.”
(Also: Duke guard Derryck Thornton had recently decided to transfer. As coded messages go, this one wasn't hard to crack.)
Which is why, just after Bolden's announcement Thursday, @DukeBluePlanet, Duke basketball's official Twitter account sent this emoji-stuffed shot across the bow:
Yes, that's a fishing rod. And fish.
The account soon deleted the tweet, but it was (obviously) too late. By then the mother of all blueblood-trolling subtweets had been captured and entered into the Internet screenshot record, its legacy forever enshrined.
Hopefully, somewhere, Coach Cal -- whose class is still No. 1 in ESPN's 2016 rankings -- is leaning over his laptop, furiously composing the "Hit 'Em Up" of coaching-website blog posts. This beef is too fun to squash just yet.