Jason Williams Has A Novel And Interesting Idea

And we say, let’s embrace and extend.

Duke great Jason Williams has an interesting new life goal: he wants to own 49 percent of Duke Basketball.

This comes after former Blue Devil Kenny Blakeney, now coaching Howard, made waves for an idea of selling equity in his program.

Unfortunately, he forgot to check with Howard and his boss shot that down pretty quickly.

Still, it’s a provocative idea. We doubt that Duke would do this, but things change and you can easily imagine a marketplace where it could happen.

If it did though, we’re not sure Williams could afford it. Duke Basketball generates a huge amount of revenue in one way or another and the worth of the program has to be quite high.

Let’s assume for a second that the value is somewhat akin to an NBA franchise. This won’t be true for every college program, but for Duke, UNC, Kentucky, Kansas, maybe UConn and Indiana it would be, and increasingly, buying an NBA team is incredibly expensive. The Boston Celtics may be sold soon and that storied franchise is expected to go for around $5 billion.

Half of Duke wouldn’t go for anywhere near that much, but it wouldn’t be cheap, probably more than Williams could pay. But here’s an idea that might work if this is ever feasible.

The Brotherhood Group - LLC.

This would consist of former players who might want to invest in the program and who could help to guard the values of Duke Basketball. Let’s speculate that Williams, Shane Battier, Jayson Tatum, Kyrie Irving, Paolo Banchero, Bobby Hurley, Grant Hill, and Zion Williamson all bought into the Brotherhood Group. Let’s also imagine that dozens of other former Blue Devils like Billy King, Kyle Singler, Johnny Dawkins and others invested and that every former Blue Devil was given a certain number of shares.

And let’s also imagine that part of the package for being a Blue Devil is equity in the program, with a basic floor for being on the team and more lucrative options for every year you stay. And let’s imagine that academic performance can boost your equity also.

How cool would it be if you were, say, Darren Harris and when you started at Duke, you immediately became partners with Williams, Hill and other icons of the program? You could even design shares for new players to kick off a retirement IRA.

College basketball doesn’t appear to be at this point just now, but as we’ve seen, things can change very quickly. It’s kind of a nice idea and we like the idea of the former players being involved.