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Kevin Trapani knows he shouldn’t have picked up his phone on the morning of June 11. He usually keeps it facedown and silent to limit distractions during meetings, but when it buzzed and he saw the banner, he couldn’t help but check it.
“Chris Pollard named Virginia’s baseball coach after 13 seasons at Duke,” the alert read.
Trapani immediately texted his family.
“Actually insane,” his son wrote back. “One of the most incredible heists of all time.”
Trapani, a former CEO who now teaches business at Elon University, is a 1979 Duke graduate who has lived in the Triangle since 1997. He’s attended all manner of Blue Devils sporting events in that time. Barely two days before getting the alert, he sat in the stands at Jack Coombs Field for the decisive third game of Duke baseball’s first-ever home NCAA super regional. The chance at a College World Series berth for the first time since 1961 was on the line.
Trapani remembers feeling confused about why Duke’s players lacked their usual “juice” as they lost 5-4 to underdog Murray State. He’d felt the same way during Duke’s 19-9 blowout loss the day before. His family did, too.
So when the alert arrived that Pollard—the man responsible for turning Duke baseball from an irrelevant ACC backmarker into a perennial NCAA tournament team—had jumped ship after failing to capitalize on the greatest opportunity in program history, Trapani was furious.
“He quit,” Trapani told The Assembly. “From my perspective, he quit on his team. He quit on his school.”
Trapani took to Facebook that day to air his grievances, touching on everything from his anger at Pollard’s disloyalty and how many of the team’s best players followed him to Virginia (seven Blue Devils decided to transfer there) to how thousands of Duke fans who had just come out to cheer their team on weren’t rewarded with reciprocal effort.
But his main gripe was simple: “I really don’t like college sports right now.”
Trapani isn’t alone. Many fans across the country have become increasingly disillusioned by a perceived disregard for loyalty and tradition as college sports have become more professionalized and less regulated. In North Carolina, a college sports mecca with 19 schools that compete in Division I (the highest level), the phenomenon has hit hard.
Pollard declined to comment for this article through a spokesperson. But two of his Duke players told The Assembly that Pollard did not accept the UVa job before Duke was eliminated from the tournament, and that Pollard, a Virginia native who grew up in the state, was open with them about why he took it. They said their coach competed hard that weekend, and they wish him well in Charlottesville.
Even if the team felt Pollard was honest with them, that doesn’t remove the shock waves his departure sent through Duke. Nor does it remove Trapani’s feeling of betrayal. In that way, whether Pollard “quit” is not quite the issue. It’s that Trapani believes he did.
“It feels to me there are a few things that just need to be done to stop this kind of craziness from happening,” Trapani said. “It just makes it very unrewarding to be a fan of any kind.”
The disconnect between college sports fans and their teams has been long-brewing, especially as conferences have expanded and regional rivalries have diluted in the pursuit of larger and larger TV contracts.
The Atlantic Coast Conference during the 1970s had seven schools in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia and Maryland; even before its recent expansion to Texas and California, it had 15 schools stretching from Indiana to Florida.
But the inciting moment for many fans can be traced to July 1, 2021, when the NCAA, after a U.S. Supreme Court decision, held that athletes could legally begin monetizing their name, image, and likeness (NIL) rights.
Now that athletes could be paid, “collectives” popped up at universities across the country, combining funds from wealthy alumni and sponsorship agreements to entice players to enroll.
Recruiting and the transfer portal—once used mostly as a way for players to adapt to coaching departures or a lack of playing time—effectively became an unchecked form of college sports free agency. And because of newly negotiated, eye-watering broadcast contracts for the Big Ten and Southeastern Conference, the NCAA’s Power 5 conferences funnelled into a Power 4 as schools scrambled to grab a slice of the financial pie. That left the Pac-12, which is attempting to rebuild, with just two schools.
Many of the changes that upset fans can be traced to athletic departments’ desire to keep up with competitors and stay financially solvent. According to The Athletic, the cost of running a Division I athletic department grew more than 200 percent between 2005 and 2023, with coaching salaries alone rising almost 400 percent. (The cumulative cost of living increase during that period was 56 percent.)
“It just makes it very unrewarding to be a fan of any kind.”
Kevin Trapani
People are frustrated “that the money is what drives all the decisions, rather than what’s best for me as a fan,” said Isaac Schade, a lifelong University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill fan and the host of the daily UNC sports podcast Locked On Tar Heels.
This is where another gripe in the “loyalty” conversation comes from, especially in North Carolina, said Joe Giglio, a Raleigh-based podcast host who has covered college sports in the state for nearly three decades as a sportswriter and radio host.
Since there are no contracts binding players to schools, Giglio said, they’re free to change allegiance at will, often to the highest bidder. And since the 2023 announcement that Southern Methodist University, the University of California, and Stanford University would be joining the ACC, the “fraternity” that many fans grew up appreciating among the conference’s four founding North Carolina schools feels less like a defining trait and more like a vestige of a bygone era.
For decades players chose their university out of loyalty to a coach, proximity to home, or a program’s tradition; now many are chasing playing time at a higher level and the biggest financial bag. This is often at the expense of spending their college career with a single school or respecting rivalries.
Aside from the baseball players who either transferred or flipped their commitment to follow Pollard to Virginia, Duke’s starting catcher, Macon Winslow, made the unprecedented choice to transfer to North Carolina—a cardinal sin in the eyes of many Duke fans. But it isn’t just Duke that has been adversely affected.
N.C. State and UNC fans alike were left flabbergasted when Ven-Allen Lubin, the starting center for the Tar Heels’ men’s basketball team last season, entered the portal in April “with full intent on returning to UNC,” per a post on X, but then announced his commitment to the Wolfpack in early June. A portal addition to N.C. State’s 2024-25 men’s basketball roster, guard Dontrez Styles, played two seasons in Chapel Hill before a year at Georgetown.
“Given the lack of structure, the lack of rules, you cannot blame someone for taking advantage of the lack of structure and the lack of rules,” Giglio said.
“It blurs the lines of rivalries is how I would say it,” Schade said. “There’s less of ‘you’re a Carolina guy, you’re a State guy, you’re a Duke guy, you’re a Wake guy,’ and you are going to have multiple players with multiple of those institutions on their resume.”
Amid disappointing postseason representation compared with fellow Power 4 schools, ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips announced earlier this year that ACC men’s basketball will move from 20 conference games to 18 to encourage harder nonconference schedules. As a result, longtime rivals NC State and UNC won’t be guaranteed of playing each other twice for the first time in more than a century.
All of this has contributed to a feeling among many that college sports are at the brink of losing everything that has made the state such a stalwart for so long.
“A lot of fans feel like they lost that grass roots, that organic, that for-the-love-of-the-game nature of [college sports],” Schade said.
One of Trapani’s favorite things about being a Duke fan has been the chance to see athletes “grow up.” He still remembers how devastated his twin children were when he told them that JJ Redick had graduated and couldn’t play in college anymore.
This is what Trapani—and many other sports fans across North Carolina—is worried he’s losing, to the detriment of everything that has made supporting his team so special.
It’s not that players like Cooper Flagg or Zion Williamson leave for the NBA after one year. It’s not that coaches and players—like former Duke football head coach Mike Elko and starting quarterback Riley Leonard—come and go, often to programs like Texas A&M or Notre Dame with more fans and resources. It’s not that the exclusive Duke men’s basketball Champions Club that Trapani and his wife were part of for almost a decade has become so expensive that they’ve been priced out, all to finance the university’s $20.5 million NIL budget.
It’s that fans’ fealty amid all the shifts is taken for granted.
This is what irked Trapani so much about Pollard’s departure. If he and thousands of Duke fans—including university president Vincent Price, athletics director Nina King, head football coach Manny Diaz, and a number of men’s and women’s basketball players—packed Jack Coombs Field in the brutal heat to cheer their team on, why didn’t he feel like that loyalty was rewarded?
This is where some nuance is helpful.
The vacant role in Charlottesville that Pollard filled only opened because Virginia’s head coach, Brian O’Connor, left for Mississippi State. When five former Cavaliers followed him and nine more departed for other schools, Virginia was left with the same roster and coaching holes Duke was about to face.
“There’s less of ‘you’re a Carolina guy, you’re a State guy, you’re a Duke guy, you’re a Wake guy,’ and you are going to have multiple players with multiple of those institutions on their resume.”
Isaac Schade, host of Locked On Tar Heels
In that way, Virginia was a sort of Duke-before-Duke: A beloved coach accepted a more lucrative opportunity elsewhere that became available because he put in the work over more than a decade to build the program he’s leaving. The ensuing scramble is thus more an unfortunate side effect than an overt betrayal.
“It still hurts for [Pollard] to leave without achieving that mission that he made so clear of reaching Omaha,” said Elliott Jarnot, a three-year baseball beat reporter for The Chronicle, Duke’s student newspaper, who followed the Pollard saga closely. “But at the same time, he left Duke in a place where they could hire someone who could come in and continue building, rather than completely rebuild.”
“Everybody was super invested in the program and invested in what guys were going to be doing after their career was over,” said Ben Miller, a star third baseman and Durham native who finished his career at Duke last season after playing three years at the University of Pennsylvania. “Growing up here, I know what it was like when Duke baseball wasn’t what it is now, and Coach Pollard is pretty much solely responsible for building it into what it’s become.”
Both Miller and outfielder Tyler Albright, a two-year starter and one of the few returners for next year, said Pollard told them about his departure at a team meeting on June 10, the day after the super regional. They said Pollard made clear he didn’t coach the series knowing he was leaving—even though Virginia reached out to him before the super regional started—and that he waited to accept the offer until Duke’s season ended.
“He stood up there and he told us, ‘Look, guys, they made me an offer I couldn’t turn down,’” Albright said. “He’s from Virginia, his parents live there, and they’re getting older, and he wants to be near them. He was just honest.”
“Coach [Pollard] made it clear when he left that nothing was accepted or finalized until after the season was over,” Miller said. “It’s not like he had accepted the job and then played the super regional knowing he was leaving.”
Five days after the news of Pollard’s departure broke, Trapani took to Facebook again. Many of the critiques from his first post remained: Pollard’s lack of commitment, how his interest in the Virginia job sabotaged Duke’s chances at making it to Omaha, how it was inexcusable that Duke lost to a team that got eliminated from the College World Series on a no-hitter.
“What happened to loyalty and honor?” someone responded in the comments.
The short answer is that it’s complicated. The long answer is that loyalty and honor still exist despite the shake-ups, but how fans, coaches, players, administrators, and universities interpret those concepts has become increasingly incongruent.
To Pollard, loyalty was to his family, to keeping his team in the dark about his potential move to pursue their postseason dreams, and then to informing his team as expeditiously and honestly as he could once he made his choice.
To Miller, loyalty was coming back to his hometown university to contribute to Pollard’s project.
To Albright, loyalty was deciding to continue his family legacy—his dad, grandfather, and uncle were Duke athletes—and finish his degree.
And to all those who followed Pollard to Charlottesville, loyalty was continuing to believe in their coach, even if it meant joining a conference rival.
“Growing up here, I know what it was like when Duke baseball wasn’t what it is now, and Coach Pollard is pretty much solely responsible for building it into what it’s become.”
Ben Miller, Duke third baseman
Trapani and the thousands of college sports fans have a different definition of loyalty. Don the jersey with pride. Fight for it the way those before you have for decades. Treat rivalries not just as traditions but hard lines never to be crossed. To fail on any of these accounts—or even seem like you have—is a betrayal.
The TV networks and streaming services paying record money for college sports programming are betting that fans’ devotion will only grow, despite their discontent. Giglio, the podcast host, suspects otherwise.
“Can you just be a fan of laundry?” Giglio asked. “Can you just blindly root for a coach and a school because of the colors and the mascot, or the nickname or the logo? I think that’s really what’s going to be tested.”
Andrew Long is a 2025 graduate of Duke University, where he studied political science, history, and journalism. He has written for The Chronicle, The Dallas Morning News, and the Tampa Bay Times.