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The Dark Money Behind Duke Basketball
Story by Andrew Beaton
• 12h•
5 min read
It’s no secret how the best college basketball teams are assembled these days: Follow the money.
It isn’t hard to find. The boosters who spend millions to lure in prized freshmen and coveted transfer players sit courtside at games, while the fundraising collectives that pool money to attract premier talent actively solicit donations online.
But if you’re looking for the money behind the most iconic brand in college basketball, the favorite to win the NCAA tournament and the team that landed future No. 1 NBA pick Cooper Flagg, you’re likely to find nothing at all.
Duke has steamrolled its way to the Final Four because it has one of the greatest collections of players in modern college basketball history. Yet who exactly is paying for a roster that cost millions of dollars to put together remains a gigantic mystery.
In a move that’s highly unusual for a major college program, there’s virtually no online footprint for Duke basketball’s booster collective. That’s not because the Blue Devils have somehow managed to construct a star-studded team without gobs of cash lining players’ pockets, though.
Instead, Duke is in a position to compete for its sixth national championship thanks to a group of high net worth donors who have chosen to operate in a way that makes them unique in the braggadocious world of college sports—by conducting their business from the shadows.
People involved with the operation say the group’s silence is intentional. They say their goal is to give coach Jon Scheyer the resources to compete, to support his vision and never be a distraction from the ultimate goal of winning national championships.
Cooper Flagg and the Blue Devils are 35-3 heading into the Final Four.© robert deutsch/Reuters
What little evidence there is of the group’s existence is buried deep in corporate records. In March of 2023, two weeks after Scheyer’s first season as Mike Krzyzewski’s replacement ended with a loss in the NCAA tournament’s round of 32, three Duke alumni incorporated a non-profit in Delaware. With an address listed as an office building in Arkansas, they called it “One Vision Futures Fund” and applied to do business in North Carolina, according to state records.
In its annual report for last year, there was no hiding its purpose in an era when college athletes get paid for their name, image and likeness. The form says, “Description of nature of business: Sports NIL.”
The address of OVFF, as it’s known, belongs to the office of Duke alum Jeff Fox, the CEO and founder of the investment firm Circumference Group. He’s listed on incorporating documents as one of three executive officers, along with fellow alumni Dan Levitan, co-founder of the venture capital firm Maveron, and Steve Duncker, a former partner at Goldman Sachs.
The three men are no strangers to supporting their alma mater on the hardwood. More than two decades ago, Levitan convinced the school to start the Duke Basketball Venture Capital Co-Investment Fund, which was believed to be the first VC fund supporting a single college sports team.
“Universities are better served by a VC participating in a fund than just giving the same amount directly,” Levitan told The Wall Street Journal in 2006.
That was eons ago in the world of college sports. Well-heeled boosters are no longer limited to funding a new practice facility or chipping in for the coaching staff to get a raise. Now they can actually pay the players.
Which makes Duke’s backers an outlier. In taking a more secretive approach, they have chosen to operate in total silence even though what they’re doing is perfectly legal.
Most collectives loudly broadcast their activities because they’ll take money from anyone with a credit card. Auburn’s “On to Victory,” “Florida Victorious” and Houston’s “LinkingCoogs” all have websites where visitors can become a member and donate to the team within a couple of clicks. Those schools’ athletic departments also publicly promote their collectives.
OVFF has no such digital presence, and its near invisibility stands in stark contrast to Duke’s other booster collective. The Durham Devil’s Club has a website offering memberships that start at $20 a month and lists a number of teams it supports from football to women’s soccer—but notably not the basketball team.
In response to inquiries from the Journal about the collective’s activities, Rachel Baker, the Duke men’s basketball general manager who was hired in 2022 to oversee NIL, says OVFF’s under-the-radar approach is quite intentional. For one, she says, it helps protect the players’ personal lives when boosters aren’t touting how much they’re being paid.
“It’s no secret what we do,” Baker says, “but the discretion around it is more about our athletes’ privacy than anything else.”
The collective’s membership has been kept small on purpose, too, Baker says. After hearing stories about donors who tried to interfere with team decision making or had strings tied to their capital, OVFF wanted a tightly held group that was happy to invest passively and trust in Scheyer to run the team.
OVFF’s privacy and exclusivity has other benefits, too, Baker says. By not advertising the dollar numbers it throws around, it has allowed the collective to stay nimble in the marketplace of players. The lean operation also means they’ve avoided overhead costs, such as a business manager, with the goal that all the money going in should flow directly back out to the players.
The timing of OVFF’s founding indicates that Duke was actually a bit late to the game of tapping wealthy supporters to pay players. While other schools immediately began forking out money, Duke took a more conservative approach—especially during the wild-west early days of NIL, when the regulations over paying players were unclear.
“When I first met coach Scheyer, one of the first things he told me: ‘We’re not bending any rules,’” Baker says. “We really sat back to survey the market and then make the best Duke decision for how we wanted to move forward.”
Given that the collective was formed after last year’s freshman class had already committed, this marks the first season when its muscle is being fully deployed. It’s no coincidence that this also marks Duke’s return to superpower status.
This Blue Devil roster features what’s undoubtedly a pricey group of talent. Flagg alone reportedly makes millions off NIL, while two of his fellow freshmen, Kon Kneuppel and Khaman Maluach, were five-star recruits who are expected to be first-round NBA picks. The team also added several key veterans in the transfer portal, home to many of the game’s fiercest bidding wars.
Baker declined to give a precise figure for the budget of this year’s roster. But even before NIL, the school was accustomed to donors contributing enormous sums to the basketball team. Duke already had something called the Legacy Fund, created by Krzyzewski to endow the team.
The minimum donation for the Legacy Fund: $1 million.
Write to Andrew Beaton at
andrew.beaton@wsj.com
