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Duke’s First Basketball Title

Duke has won five NCAA titles, 16 regional finals, 21 ACC Tournament titles and four Southern Conference Tournament titles.

That’s a lot of hardware.

But the first one may have been the most unexpected of them all.

It took Eddie Cameron a decade to win his first title at Duke. Duke was in the Southern Conference in those days. There was no payoff for a conference title, no automatic qualifier to anything bigger. This was as big as it got, at least until the NIT started in 1938 and the NCAA Tournament in 1939.

The Southern Conference was an ungainly behemoth.