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<p>Well, you don’t know the details of the secret then. It’s not about whether school relaxes their standards for basketball and football, it’s about how much they do it. Duke relaxes their standard THE MOST for its bb team. If they held the same admission standard for its bb team as its other teams, it wouldn’t be able to recruit good numbers of talented players that had been on their teams, as k&s pointed out. I think teams like NU or Stanford have grad rate in the 80s or 90s%. Actually STanford’s team had achieved 100% grad rate before.</p>
<p>k&s,
You are right that Stanford shows that you can have a good team without lowering admission standard to the extent (everyone does it; it’s a matter of how much) that Duke does. However, that doesn’t mean they get recruits with lots of talents. Other than the Lopez twins, the current Stanford’s team is made up of players that weren’t 5-star (or even 4-star) recruits. Stanford team is never the most talented to start out. That’s one of the main reasons the team hasn’t gone to the next level.</p>