The Economics of Scarcity and the UNC-Duke Basketball Game (with Michael Munger)

Michael Munger: It is a pleasure on both counts.

Michael Munger: I’m happy to get a chance to talk about this. Basketball is very important in North Carolina. It’s important in other states also–Kentucky, Indiana. So, I don’t want to claim that North Carolina is best, but it is certainly up there in the importance of college basketball, as opposed to professional basketball or other professional sports.

So, I was an undergraduate at Davidson College. We always played Duke and got killed. Then I moved to University of North Carolina, where I was much more initiated into the cultic dislike of the other. So, UNC and Duke–almost everyone at UNC or Duke agrees on one thing: The UNC-versus-Duke game is the archangel Gabriel against Satan himself.

Now, they disagree about who Gabriel and Satan are, but they completely agree that this is not just a basketball game, but good versus evil. People will be depressed. They’re–shots will be taken. People will have to wear clothing if they lose a bet on the outcome of this game.

So, the–ACC [Atlantic Coast Conference] basketball generally, but Duke-UNC in particular, has a sort of cultic status among those of us who are in this area. And, perhaps not surprisingly, the tickets to that game are very expensive. People want actually to participate in the experience. Now, UNC is a very large stadium, the Dean Dome. It holds 14-, 15,000 people. It has a student area of 6,000. So, it is possible to go to the UNC-Duke game, although it’s pretty expensive.

But–I have a visual aid here–I went to StubHub and I’ll say about it, but for those people who are watching this on YouTube, this is Cameron Indoor Stadium. It holds 9,000 people. The student section there is 1200. And, I wanted to get an idea of the shadow price of a student ticket.

And so, as you see here, up in the nosebleed seats, it’s $2,200. Now that’s for two tickets. So, for a college basketball game, it’s $1,100 apiece. For the good seats, it’s $9,000. So, those are prices that we often see actually not just asked, but accepted.

And so, the price of going to this game at Cameron Indoor Stadium, this tiny little relic of a high school gym, is something–some people have called it the greatest college basketball experience in America. I’ve never liked Duke, so I’m willing to concede that other people think that.

Michael Munger: It’s nine miles, as the crow flies. It’s about 11 miles by a road. So it’s not far.

Michael Munger: You’re right to correct me. When I said I went there: I moved there from the University of Texas as a faculty member. Quite so.

Michael Munger: Not only can a student not sell, they have a variety of mechanisms for ensuring that the student can’t sell it. And, one of them is in order to get in, you have to have a student ID [student identification] and you have to have a wristband showing that you have registered and that you are the person you are claiming to be. So, they don’t give out student tickets. So, students cannot sell their tickets.

I showed just that just as a shadow price: that’s something about what the student tickets would be worth. But, in 2006, a young man named Tristan Patterson tried to sell his student ticket by giving someone–he advertised, not very clever, on Craigslist and asked $3,000 for his ticket, and said that ‘You’re going to have to look enough like a student. I will give you my ID. We’ll go in.’ He had actually waited in line and gotten the ticket. He got kicked out. And so, we wouldn’t know about people who were successful. So, this is a selection. We would only know about people who failed.

It is very difficult for students to sell their tickets. However, on StubHub, it’s pretty easy for the grownups to sell their tickets.

Michael Munger: The student section is Section 17, which is immediately courtside across from the two teams. So, you can see the two teams, and it’s immediately a long, narrow–that’s courtside. They’re clearly the best seats in the house. So, the student tickets are the best seats in the house.

Michael Munger: Yes. And, those are for people who can’t get in to 17. [Section] 18 is for people who–those tend to be more organized groups because they get behind the basket and try to distract the players from the other team from shooting free throws. And for the band. Section 18 is for the band. 19 is more graduate students; and those are farther away. Those are not nearly as good. So, the undergraduate student seating is section 17.

Michael Munger: No, you’re right. The 1200 includes all of that student–

Michael Munger: Six thousand.

Michael Munger: There it’s the nineteen-seventies–

Michael Munger: Some of you young people might–the 1970s.

Michael Munger: It would be wrong not to mention that. Yes.

Michael Munger: I’m afraid that in anticipation for doing this–because I wrote a piece for AIER [American Institute for Economic Research], which by the time this airs will have come out, and so I hope you’ll put up a link to that also so people can look at it. But, the past week, I have just gone down a rabbit hole trying to figure out the details of this. So, I’m actually pretty mad at you, Russ, for agreeing to do this. You could have protected me by saying, ‘No, no, that’s too arcane.’ So, I will try not to be too arcane in my description.

So, Adam Smith in Book One, Chapter Five of The Wealth of Nations famously said, “The real price of every thing… is the toil and trouble of acquiring it.” And so, I ask my students–because I want to torment them: they would rather give definitions than think–I ask them, ‘Does Starbucks have surge pricing?’ And they all say, ‘Well, no. Uber has surge pricing.’

Starbucks totally has surge pricing, because the length of the line is part of the cost of paying.

So, if I’m at the airport and I think I want to get some coffee, so, I walk over towards Starbucks and I see there’s a 20-minute line. The cost of the $7 latte is not $7. It’s $7 plus 20 minutes. And so, I would actually be willing to pay more for not having a line. And, if Starbucks were giving away lattes for free, there would be an hour wait. So, nothing is free if people want it.

So, economists have a concept called scarcity. Scarcity is the idea that more people want the thing than can get the thing at the current price. And, the question is what to do when there is scarcity. Because that means that not everyone who wants it can get it at the current price. And, there’s four main things that economists have listed that we can do.

One is to raise the price.

The second is queuing, which is first-come, first-serve. That’s what Starbucks uses. That certainly is, we’ll see, a version of what Duke does.

The third is chance. Lottery. That, we will decide–and that seems fair in the sense that we all have an equal opportunity to get it, and just chance determines who gets it.

And then, the last is authority or discretion. So, we might decide based on who we think–we could have some sorts of characteristics. And, you’ve talked a number of times on this show about the dangers of discretion. Because, the minimum wage, for example, allows discretion on the part–because more people want the job than can get it at this wage. And then, they can exercise tastes that they might have for discrimination, for acting badly. And, that means that if you use authority, you are giving–probably the discretion will be misused.

All of these four things have a disadvantage.

However, price, it seems to me, and since I have tenure, I’m going to go ahead and say this. Because Duke is not the only ‘elite’–I’m making air quotes for those listening–‘elite’ university that does this; but Duke seems to miss no opportunity to take students by the ankles and shake the change out of their pocket. On every margin. So, the costs of food, the costs of housing, fees. Lord knows: tuition–$75,000 US. Now, not everybody pays full freight, but we are trying to maximize revenue. And, in fact, there was a very great EconTalk guest, Eugene Fama, who in January of 2012 did a terrific EconTalk. And, I should point out, he then won the Nobel Prize in October of 2013. Coincidence, I think not.

Michael Munger: Well, I don’t know which caused which. Maybe it was selection. Obviously you only invite people of that quality, so it may not have been causal. But, he and Michael Jensen were just en fuego [trans.: on fire] in the mid-1980s. So, 1983 and then two papers in 1985, they said, ‘People don’t understand nonprofits.’ And, nonprofits don’t mean you’re not trying to get revenue. It just means that what you do with the revenue is different. There’s no residual claimant. People are more willing to contribute.

And so, big universities and other big nonprofits, it’s not that they’re not trying to maximize revenue. They are. It’s just that then there’s no residual claimant. And so, people are also willing to make contributions. You can have a big endowment, and so that you probably still get mail from UNC saying, ‘Will you contribute to the endowment? Boy, it would really help.’

So, there’s a puzzle. Duke–well, I shouldn’t say Duke. Universities–elite universities–miss no opportunity to try to maximize revenue on almost every margin. And yet, Duke does this weird thing. It may be the most sought after, most expensive athletic ticket in all of college sports, which is the Duke game against UNC in Cameron Indoor Stadium, which is a tiny little high school gym. They do not charge money for it. They give it away for free.

Now, of course, if you’re going to give it away for free, that means it’s going to be scarce, because, as you said, a lot more people want it. So, which of the other mechanisms do they use?

It seems as if they should–and I’m using this in an efficiency sense–they should use a lottery. The advantage of a lottery is that it’s arbitrary and it has far less dead weight loss. So, dead weight loss is the name that economists give to the resources that are wasted in competing for a rent. And, this is a kind of rent-seeking. So, I want this valuable thing. It’s free. What do you have to do in order to get it? Well, you have to wait in line. How long? Well, longer than the next person who wants it.

And so, there’s this arms race where you have to wait longer and longer. And, it turned out that the solution at Duke was to wait–not go sit in the seat that day, not the previous night. Six weeks!

Michael Munger: But, your example raises a bunch of interesting questions coinciding with Duke actually becoming pretty good in the early 1980s. So, Duke had been up and down. It’s not that Duke was no good before Coach K, and though I can pronounce Krzyzewski correctly, I’m going to say Coach K and K-Ville. I’m not going to pronounce his name again. Duke had been good on and off before the arrival of Coach K. And, on the arrival of Coach K, Duke was terrible for quite a while. It was easy to get tickets. You could show up in the middle of the game and get student seats. So, it wasn’t a problem.

Then, though, Duke started to get good–they had several good years. And, in 1986, a lot of people wanted to see the Carolina game because UNC was also good. And this story now has become legend. It’s actually, as you said, it’s in the terrible video, but this is described as an origin story. A young woman named Kimberly Reed, who was a senior and had gone to a number of games–and some friends of hers were playing quarters. And so, one of the things that I looked up was, what is the difference between quarters and beer pong? I thought they were basically the same game. They’re not.

Michael Munger: Well, see, I didn’t know that. This must be a UNC thing because we at Davidson did not drink. So, that was certainly not a thing that I’ve ever heard of.

So, quarters, you’re trying to bounce a quarter into a cup; and there’s conditions. They had played quite a few rounds of this and they had said, ‘We probably should go. We need to plan how we’re going to get the Duke UNC tickets.’ And, someone said, ‘Well, why don’t we just pitch a tent?’ And, after a few rounds, that started to sound like a good idea.

But they were warm and inside. This is in January. And so, North Carolina is not New Hampshire, but it often gets down to 40, maybe 30. It snows, it rains. It’s pretty uncomfortable. And so, they considered asking–Kimberly Reed and her friends–considered asking Dean Sue, who is still–has just retired from Duke–and she was the Dean of Students for, I think, over a century. And, they said, ‘We’re not going to ask. It’s much easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission.’ So, they went to U-Haul and they rented an enormous party tent and they set it up and only the 15 people who had participated were allowed in the tent and other people saw that and said, ‘Hey, that’s like a comfortable lounge chair, I now realize.’

So, Duke, by allowing tents–because the question was, are we going to allow this or not? And, they said, ‘Well, I guess we will, because the alternative is they will be out in the elements. It’ll be much more uncomfortable.’

Once tents were allowed, it was no longer true that you would just stay overnight. They started to stay for multiple nights. And, it is a little village. It is a brigadoon. So, Brigadoon is the famous Broadway musical about a little village–I think that it only comes once every 99 or 100 years–in Scotland. And so, it appears those people are there for a night. The young gentleman goes; he dances with a young lady. The next day, the village disappears and it doesn’t come back for a hundred, so you’ll never see it again.

But, K-Ville is annual. This is the 60th year, 6-0, 60th year from 1986–forgive me, the 40th year, from 1986 to 2026, consecutive, that K-Ville has been done. Although in 2021, there were some conditions, but still they allowed them to do it because it was outside. They were a little worried because of COVID [Coronavirus Disease]. But, 40 straight years there has now been this ephemeral, evanescent little tent village that shows up and it exists for a little while–and it has streets, it has lights, it has customs–and then it disappears and it’s gone for an entire year.

The conditions and rules that they have come up with–this is entirely student-done. All of this has been delegated to the students. It’s a bit like Burning Man. So, it has a constitution, it has a set of rules, it has a police force that are perceived by people not on the police force as being fascist, and there’s an appeals process. So, if you disagree with the decision of the so-called line monitors, you can file a grievance and go through the appeals process with an independent authority. So, all of this has been created by the students as a way of managing the fact that once you made it more comfortable, the line got much longer.

Michael Munger: I think we should go through that at least.

Michael Munger: I can do that in just–I’ve tried to get an outline where I can do that in just a couple of minutes.

Michael Munger: So, the Duke Student Government–the DSG–every November, votes on a set of rules that is the constitution for the coming year, which they then put up online. And, I sent you the 2025/2026 version, so you can put that up in the show notes. So, the deadline to switch out or into a tenting group is January 16th. If more people have registered–if more than 80 different tents have registered–that means that that is more than the limit of black tents, which is the first one. There’s black, blue, and white. So, black is the first one to come online. If there’s more than 80 that have registered–and the registration process is you can have up to 12 people in the tent, and then everybody has to present their ID [identification].

If there’s more than 80, they have an exam. And, the exam–I have a copy of a previous one. I obviously don’t have this year’s. This year’s will be very valuable. But, there’s 52 questions–58 questions. It’s 14 pages long. And all of them are extremely detailed questions about what has happened in basketball this year.

So, for example, Question 16: Who did Duke play in a secret scrimmage against before the season began? In what city did they play? What was the final score? Now, almost no one knows that this even happened. So, it’s a secret scrimmage, after all. So, you have to be a fanatical Duke fan.

So, the point is, in order even to get a chance to tent, you have to pass an exam.

Michael Munger: So, let me give the dates for that. Black tenting is from January 18th to January 28th. Blue tenting is from January 28th to February 9th, and white tenting is from February 14th to 28th. And, the rules are much less strict as you go down that hierarchy. However, it’s important to note, black tents convert from black to blue on the 28th. So, all of them–blue tenting is just a rule for all the tents. So, at first, the black tenting rules are for all the tents.

You can be checked at any time. If the people are not in the tent, the tent will be removed. And, that’s why they call the line monitors ‘fascists,’ because you’ll be kicked out. Blue tenting is a little bit easier. White tenting, which is from February 14th to February 28th, is much less severe. All of the tents convert to white on February 14th.

So, it’s just the earliest period that is the most draconian, because those are the people who are going to get in the front row of section 17.

The question is, why do they–they give a quiz. There’s 58 questions. And they have to write up a new one every year. So, let me give the description. I think this is remarkable. Again, students wrote this. So, let me give their reason. “Unlike other universities that use a random lottery or ticket sales to determine which students are admitted to a sporting event, K-Ville is proud of its first come, first served, meritocratic approach.” So, that word was just added. ‘Meritocratic’ has never been there until this year. So, until now, it just said ‘first come, first serve’ approach. This year, they added ‘meritocratic.’

Michael Munger: Well, there’s hundreds of people, all of whom have to take it on the same day; and it’s the average score of your entire tent. So, you probably want to make sure not just that you’re tenting with your friends, but you may very well need to tent with other fanatics.

Now, I only read one of the questions. This is not a cerebral test. This is memorizing trivia–

Michael Munger: And so, the more trivial, the better. And so, I have suggested that an alternative is: All they need to do is have a Bunsen burner set up on a table, and I can just hold my hand in it, and whoever will hold their hand in at the longest, ‘Okay, you’re in. Nope, you’re out.’ This is: How much will I hurt myself? They study for weeks to try to memorize these trivia, so the people who know the most about something stupid. This is a loyalty filter.

Michael Munger: Sorry. Well, about something irrelevant. This is not knowledge that is especially useful except in the context of this test.

Michael Munger: So, George Akerlof had a famous series of papers about loyalty filters. And, one of the examples that is used in that literature is that when China first was trying to establish a civil service, they had a problem because if you are far–the provinces that are far away, very difficult to monitor or enforce–

Michael Munger: Yeah. From the capital. And, the mountains are high and the emperor is far.

And so, the Civil Service exam was: Could you memorize and write from memory, in beautiful calligraphy, classical Chinese poetry? Which had nothing to do with your job. But it meant that you were willing to do something. And [?]: I’m going to double down. Something stupid. This has no point except that you will do something that is orthogonal. This is not in your interest, except to do this thing that shows I have the intensity. Because everyone, if you ask them, ‘Are you a fanatic?’ ‘Absolutely. I’m a crazy fan.’

Michael Munger: This is a Motte and Bailey thing. I am now going to retreat to my prepared line of defense. It may not be perfectly correlated, but it is more correlated than other things that are easily measured.

Michael Munger: The other things would be measured with even more–this is actually relatively cheap. So, everyone takes it at exactly the same time, so there’s no way for it to leak. Although money might be a way around this. If I am one of the line monitors who has made up the exam and I have a copy and you offer me, I don’t know, $10,000, I’d probably think about it. That’s a lot. And, that’s a sign of devotion, and I get $10,000. So, maybe it does happen. However, the position of line monitor is extremely honorable. Even though people call them fascists, they all want to be one.

Michael Munger: Oh, it is a position of honor. You can say that it’s something like Tom Sawyer whitewashing the fence and it’s not really an honor. Thinking makes it so. It is perceived as an honor. You bitter UNC fans make me sick.

Michael Munger: Absolutely not. Absolutely not.

Michael Munger: They get seats though. They get seats–

Michael Munger: Russ, you’re understating this. Let me say–maybe you knew this and just didn’t want to mention it. There are border guards.

Michael Munger: The line monitors in the middle of the night, they go around with a fantastically loud air horn. And, three times they sound the air horn. You have five minutes to check in and a third of your tent has to check in or the tent is moved. There are border guards, which means that you have to be physically in–maybe not in your tent, but you can’t be in the gym, you can’t be in the bathroom, and you can’t be outside of this well-defined area. There’s a very specifically defined area about what constitutes K-Ville. And, before they do a check, they call all of the line monitors and they form a line along the border. If anyone tries to come in, they check your ID, and you do not count towards the tent count.

Michael Munger: And, you are the same person who registered to wait–

Michael Munger: to prevent people from selling their place in line.

Michael Munger: They really check. There’s barcodes. It’s very hard to do that.

Michael Munger: Several every year.

Michael Munger: Every year. And, it’s not one.

Michael Munger: You have to have one third. And so, most of the time–this is the middle of the night, too–so that you can take turns. And then, the check could be during the day. And, if it is, then you have to–and that’s another thing you have to do. At the beginning of the semester, you all have to compare class schedules and you can’t all have a class at the same time. Many are called, few are chosen.

Michael Munger: Well, let me say what’s interesting about Skarbek’s example is that often the justice is enforced against a member of your own tribe. So, some member of our gang behaves badly against a member of another gang. And so, the heads of the two gangs will meet and the aggrieved one says, ‘Look, we don’t want a war. Nobody wants a war here. What are you going to do?’ And so, the members of the gang beat the heck out of their own member in a way that–

Michael Munger: It’s not in front of a camera, but it is within the sight of the other gang. And, they say, ‘Okay, justice has been done. We’re good. No problem.’ And, that’s a very strong deterrent that–I think: I’m in a gang, I’m invulnerable. No. I am going to be–the enforcers are the members of my own tribe.

That’s true of Duke students. So, the enforcers here are the members of their own tribe. These are people who tented as first-years. Second-years, maybe they tried to be line monitors. By the time they’re a senior, they know all the rules, they’ve participated in this; and, being a line monitor, they really believe fiercely in this. The definition of K-Ville is very strongly enforced. They are the law. They are delegated. The prison example is a good one. The prison guards are likely to at least implicitly accept the emergent order that is produced by these prison constitutions because they can’t control these prisoners if there’s a war, if there’s a giant fight. And so, the fact that there’s less violence: if they have this constitution, the guards will look the other way. ‘Okay, that was deserved. They were punishing their own member. I didn’t hear a thing.’

Here, they are–normally, people would not tolerate someone else acting like this: being officious, blowing an air horn in the middle of the night, saying, ‘No: You, no soup for you. No ticket for you.’ So, there are ticket-Nazis, like on Seinfeld: ‘No. No ticket for you. You have to go to the back.’ So, they have to re-register; and then by the time they get to the white-ticket era, that means you’re probably not going to get in. So, some of those are–they’re called ‘flex.’ The white ticket–white-tent people are depending on some of the black- and blue-tent people getting kicked out. And it happens. So, in expected value, it actually happens.

Michael Munger: It is all completely delegated to students.

Now, in equilibrium, I could imagine that if the students said, ‘We’re going to have public floggings,’ that would be out. But the–in equilibrium, yes, it’s all delegated. So, the students recognize there’s some things that they can’t do. They can’t have beatings or struggle sessions. But, yes, this is all entirely delegated; and the practice of pestering people at night, you might be concerned that people have maybe a lower GPA [grade-point average], maybe they get sick. There’s a variety of concerns. The constitution is 50 pages long.

There’s a bunch of dispensations and ways where you do not have to show up. So, the main ones are if it is below 35 degrees, if there’s two inches of snow on the ground, or 30 mile-an-hour winds. So, you could have 34 degrees, an inch of snow, and 20 mile-an-hour winds, and you still have to be there.

So, they’re trying to make it uncomfortable in a way, because those conditions are–it’s called grace. You get grace: you get to go away. You also get grace two hours before and two hours after any home basketball game, because it’s assumed you’ll want to go to the basketball game. And, you get grace an hour before and an hour after any away game, because it’s assumed you’ll want to go watch that on TV. So there’s all sorts of periods in here that are built in where no one has to be in K-Ville.

Michael Munger: I’m not saying that. In equilibrium, the administration has no say in that.

Michael Munger: The administration says nothing about them.

Michael Munger: It’s not that it has no say, but it says nothing. It looks at it and it says, ‘All right.’

Michael Munger: Have you got a cup of haterade there, because you clearly need a little more haterade?

Michael Munger: I’m going to fuss at you about that. This is how we train fighter pilots, elite military units, and Duke basketball fans.

Michael Munger: In all three cases, it is the severity of the initiation rite that creates a sense of solidarity and belonging. The average GPA [grade point average] is higher for people who tent. They are far more likely to give money and large amounts of money for a very long time.

So, we started out with a puzzle: Why would Duke do this? They’re leaving literally millions of dollars on the table. Now, maybe it’s causal; maybe it’s not; maybe it’s selection. And, I agree it’s partly selection.

I think it’s partly causal. Somebody comes to Duke–my younger son, Brian, went to Duke, tented in 2011. The experience was horrible, and he still keeps in touch with the people that he tented with. It is a bonding experience. And, I’m not saying other places should necessarily emulate it, but something that emerges from the existing culture that students come to own and they come to value. And, that then is one of the connections that years later at a reunion is a way of organizing–getting more money for Duke’s endowment. In the long run, it might very well even be monetarily useful. They probably don’t get as much as if they were to sell it. But it would change the nature of the game.

If they auctioned off the tickets to the highest bidder, it would be much quieter. All of the grownups that now have to pay–let me say for just a second: If you want a ticket in Cameron Indoor Stadium as a grownup, you have to pay $10,000 a year for five years to the Iron Dukes to get onto a list that takes up to 20 years–and still contributing $10,000 a year–in order to get a chance to be able to buy season tickets. So, your ability to get tickets any other way are not very much. But some people who go to Duke will end up doing that if they still live in the area.

So, I think it creates the kind of fanaticism that we intentionally use for fighter pilots and elite troops.

Michael Munger: Well, but bootcamp is mandatory. All of them have to go through this. In fighter pilots and in elite military units, every day they say, ‘You can quit. You’re crazy. Why would you be here? Go somewhere else. Somebody else better will take your place. It’s okay. You should just quit.’ This is entirely voluntary. Nobody is making these kids do this.

The other thing that what you just said reminded me of–two things. One is that if Cameron Indoor or if Duke’s K-Ville were to change, I think a lot of the other teams in the league and the television contract would all object behind the scenes. Because, one of the things that makes the television contract so valuable for all the other teams is there’s always an opponent. And, everybody wants to watch the crazies in K-Ville play someone. Those games are really valuable for the TV contract.

Michael Munger: I forgot the other thing.

Michael Munger: They play at UNC.

Michael Munger: I want to add one thing about–since I have tried to defend Duke, let me take a little bit of that back. I am a UNC fan. It is true. And, Coach K’s last two games I thought were an embarrassment to Duke because it was this sort of coordination. And, if you want to do that, that’s fine. But, there was an opponent, and the opponent was UNC. So, they had all of the speeches beforehand, which UNC was required to sit there and listen to about how great Coach K was. And then, Duke got their butt kicked at home by UNC. And, afterwards– the score was 94 to 81, which is not that close for a home game for Duke. And, well, the result was that after the game, Coach K with very tight pursed lips said, ‘That’s just unacceptable. That’s unacceptable.’ And so, I got this t-shirt made. And so, those people who are watching on YouTube can see it. Let me just read it. It says, ’94-81 Acceptable.’ And then, it has UNC’s logo. So, I immediately bought one of these shirts. I think it is acceptable that Duke lost because I think Duke made a marketing mistake by pretending we could both have an actual game, which you might lose and pretend this is the coronation for Duke.

I remember the other thing that I wanted to say. I was interested if there was anything measurable about the difference in what we might call home court advantage. You mentioned that Duke is perceived to have a substantial home court advantage. And the students are obnoxious. The foul line is only three or four feet from the student section. They can lean far forward and you can see them out of–

Michael Munger: That would be bad if it were the–so the side lines. So, all along section 17, if they lean forward and somebody holds their legs, you can see them in your peripheral vision as you’re trying to inbound. And they’re screaming things. And, what are they screaming? Well, for each of the opposing players, they have investigated embarrassing things about their mom, their girlfriend; so-and-so broke up with you–horrible things. In some cases, like a death in the family. So, I hate this. I hate the fact that they do this. But, it is one of the things that they feel like they get to do that seems like it should create a home field advantage. And so, I wanted to see if your head would explode, Russ.

Studies show–so, I asked AI, ‘What team in college basketball has the biggest home court advantage?’ And, it immediately said, ‘Duke.’ And, I said, ‘All right, what is the evidence for that? Is there differences in betting lines, home and away for the same opponent for Duke?’ ‘No, Duke is not in the top 10.’ ‘Are there differences in scores for how Duke does against other teams, home and away?’ ‘No, it’s not in the top 10.’ And so, then being astonished but not surprised, I asked the AI, ‘What is the basis for you thinking that there’s a big home court advantage? Because two of the things that are measurable, Duke’s not even in the top 10.’ And, it said, ‘Well, everyone says that it has the biggest home court advantage.’

And, that’s worth something. That’s actually worth something when it comes to TV contracts. But there’s no evidence of it.

Michael Munger: May I take something back? I’ve been pretty hard on Coach K. I think he is the best coach in the history of college sport. Not basketball: in the history of college sport. Consistent success, everybody graduated, no scandals. And, if you look at the number of his players that make it into professional ranks, it’s almost unprecedented. So, I think he is the best coach in the history of college sport; and I will always dislike him.

Michael Munger: A pleasure as always, Russ.