Psssssst! Want an insider tip on picking your NCAA men's basketball tournament bracket(s) next March?
A sure-fire winner? Something to overflow the kids' college funds?
Take Duke. Only Duke. In every bracket. And when it comes to that nettlesome tiebreaker, where you have to pick the score? Pick the Blue Devils big. Like 15 to 17 points big. Something along the lines of 83-67. At the very least.
Because the Dookies are loaded, quite possibly like never before, and that's saying something for a program that's won five NCAA titles under coach Mike Krzyzewski since 1991.
But perhaps never before has Duke University - as longtime college basketball announcer Billy Packer insisted on calling it - been this loaded, potentially filling four spots in its starting lineup this coming season with the No. 1-ranked high school players at their positions this past season.
And the best of those incoming freshmen, Marvin Bagley III, is arguably the best newcomer to hit the college game since Anthony Davis led Kentucky to the 2012 NCAA championship during his won-and-done season of college purgatory.
Bagley's announcement at about 11:40 Monday night on ESPN that he is reclassifying to the 2017 signing class (from 2018) and choosing the Blue Devils has dramatically tilted the 2017-18 season in favor of Duke, which last won the title in 2015 with a similar collection of outrageously gifted young folks.
That team could count on big man Jahlil Okafor (drafted third), Justice Winslow (picked 10th) and point guard Tyus Jones (chosen 24th) to bring home Coach K's fifth NCAA crown to Durham, N.C.
And three first-rounders comprise a pretty strong nucleus. But with the big man Bagley in tow, NBADraft.net predicts five Dookies will go among the first 26 picks in the 2018 draft, led by Bagley at No. 2 and Atlanta native and power forward extraordinaire Wendell Carter at No. 9. Throw in shooting guard Gary Trent Jr. at No. 12, point guard Trevon Duval at No. 20 and returning senior wing Grayson Allen at No. 26 and it's easy to see why Duke is now almost everyone's pick - including in Las Vegas, which makes its odds of winning it all 3-1 with no one else closer than 8-1 - to cut down the nets in San Antonio come April.
Of course, critics would say we believed this same coronation was all but certain this time last year, and had freshman bigs Harry Giles and Marques Bolden not been bedeviled by injuries, Duke might be looking to repeat for the second time in Coach K's long and storied career, much as it did in 1991 and 1992.
But injuries and chemistry issues seemed to dog the Dookies all last season, right up until the night they lost the South Carolina in the NCAA tourney round of 32.
However, that team couldn't strongly protect the rim and had no leader at the point. All you need to know about the 6-foot9-11 Bagley is this: In the Drew League, which is filled with NBA guys trying to stay in shape during the summer, Bagley went for 18 points and 20 rebounds in its all-star game. Before that, he totaled 32 points and 11 rebounds in the same game that NBA All-Star DeMar DeRozan was on the court.
This doesn't mean that everyone in the basketball business is necessarily happy with this development, even if Bagley does have family roots in Durham, despite living much of his life out West. Noted Boston Globe writer and ESPN commentator Bob Ryan, when asked Tuesday about this latest certain one-and-done addition to Duke: "Here they are out-Calipari-ing (Kentucky coach John) Calipari with one-and-done. They're just as manipulative and greedy as everybody else."
To help prove his point, he returned to that quaint time before Krzyzewski won his first NCAA title and he refused to hang an ACC championship banner until every senior on that team graduated and Alaa Abdelnaby hadn't.
Alas, times change. Rules change. The desire to win changes and the few Coach K critics who are out there believed he changed when he could no longer win big the old way.
Because of that - regardless of what you think of one-and-done - it's more than a little disingenuous to vilify Calipari and deify Krzyzewski when they now both drink from the same recruiting well.
Yet whatever system Coach K is now using to hang banners, he makes it work better than anyone else in the business, which is why he's won more games than any men's coach in the history of the sport (1,071) and won more NCAA titles than anyone but the late, great Wizard of Westwood, former UCLA coach John Wooden, who collected 10.
Bagley's commitment, assuming he clears NCAA academic guidelines for reclassifying, won't ruin this upcoming season. Michigan State, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisville and Arizona could all take down the Dookies on a given night, beginning with Nov. 14, when Michigan State meets Duke in Chicago in the State Farm Classic.
But as ESPN's Paul Biancardi noted late Monday night, "(Bagley) changes the race for the national title."
Actually, barring injury, that race may now only be for who finishes second.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.