SAN ANTONIO—They say there is no cheering in the press box, but on Friday at the Alamodome, a slight exception was made.
Just before taking the court for his final practice ahead of the Final Four, Duke Blue Devils star Cooper Flagg was named the AP National Player of the Year—the youngest ever to win the prestigious award.
As the 18-year-old sheepishly reacted to the announcement and slightly blushed at the recognition, every one of his teammates had filtered in to yell, clap and holler at the power forward from the back of the room.
Flagg’s college chapter will close this weekend on either Saturday night against the Houston Cougars or on Monday night in the national title game. If you’re looking for the blueprint for a modern elite basketball player, it’s hard to find a better example than what Flagg offered up at Duke this past season.
Successful on the court. Just as successful, by design, off it.
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“I think it’s just a surreal feeling. This whole tournament process so far has been kind of surreal for me. These are the moments you dream about as a little kid. You know, it’s the biggest stage of college basketball,” Flagg said. “I’m just trying to cherish these moments with my teammates that we have left.”
“I just mentioned that to [wife Kelly Flagg], I said you know this is the last weekend? This is it, you know. It’s going to be bittersweet because we’ve all had such a good year at Duke, not just Cooper, as a family,” Ralph Flagg, Cooper’s father, says. “The entire group of parents has been amazing. All year long, the coaches have been amazing. The whole Duke staff is just great. It’s all been very welcoming and been a very positive year. So to see it end is going to be very, very bittersweet.”
Bittersweet, but always part of the plan to be here. This is where Cooper Flagg was destined and guided toward since his early days.
That origin story has been well-documented by this point, as he developed into the prodigal son of a state, Maine, which hasn’t produced an NBA draft pick since 1984. It is on track to have the No. 1 overall selection in just a few months.
Flagg has proven himself to be the runaway top pick even when he doesn’t have the ball in his hands. He’s become the face of the Blue Devils’ program as a true freshman and of March Madness in general this year.
He’s in a Gatorade campaign during the tourney as part of a multiyear deal and earned rave reviews from family, coaches and teammates for his acting chops in an AT&T TV ad that was filmed last year with his grandma.
“My favorite one is the bingo. I think the bingo one was great acting. You see his mammy in there. I thought it was a pretty good job by him,” Duke coach Jon Scheyer said. “Frankly, our guys have done a great job. Once the tournament started, they haven’t done a lot of NIL stuff. They did it earlier in the year. They’ve been locked into this once-in-a-lifetime chance we have here.”
While that may be true, many of the brands in Flagg’s orbit are looking long-term as he is introduced to the larger sporting public.
In an example that hints toward his future, a deal with AT&T negotiated through Flagg’s agency, CAA, was handled by the telecom company’s NBA marketing team, not the one responsible for their corporate partnership with the NCAA.
“As we think about NIL, we do want to bridge that crossover between the NCAA and the path to professional basketball with the NBA and WNBA,” says Andrea Wilson, AT&T’s director of sponsorships and experiential marketing. “We are very excited about not just having Cooper in the spot, but really growing alongside him, and his journey, over at least the next year as he makes that transition to draft and on into his first year in the league.
“You see him and his family being very selective about the brands they work with it, the high-profile ones, so I know we’re in very good company with the other partners that he has on his roster right.”
Flagg signed with New Balance shortly before he enrolled at Duke and has a burgeoning relationship with Fanatics. In addition to becoming Gatorade’s first men’s college basketball player to sign with the brand, he has several smaller deals leveraging his more than a million combined social media followers.
He’s also well trained.
You won’t see Flagg at news conferences next to a cup from Powerade, the tournament’s official drinks sponsor, for example, and he’s savvy enough to avoid a touchy subject in the NIL world about what shoes he’s wearing on the court in college.
“Obviously, I love New Balance and I would love to wear their shoe, but we’re in a situation where Duke is with Nike, obviously,” Flagg said last week during the East Regional. “So just respecting the rules that are in place and kind of what we have to follow.”
Though Flagg’s portfolio of NIL deals doesn’t quite come close to that of USC women’s basketball star JuJu Watkins in terms of breadth, he is still likely the highest-paid college athlete in the country when factoring in what he receives from Duke’s hoops collective. Two sources who spoke to Sports Illustrated believe Flagg will enter the NBA draft having made more than LeBron James did coming out of high school—a notable benchmark after the latter signed with Nike in 2003 in a deal averaging, at the time, nearly $13 million a year.
Managing all of that can, at times, be a full-time job, but it is shared among nearly a dozen Duke staffers connected to the men’s basketball program. There are roughly eight managers with the team who can run interference—blocking and tackling, in program parlance—around him. Sometimes, two or three sports information directors are attached to the group to deal with the throngs of media requests that arise.
“I’ve had guys before that are trying to balance wanting to do a lot of media branding. Cooper is very humbled and grateful for all the attention he gets, but he has no interest,” says Duke’s general manager and former Nike executive, Rachel Baker. “I work really closely with his agency and when things are too big to pass up, he does it. He really wants to be a kid and hang out with teammates and play basketball. So we block and tackle as much as we need to.”
Despite having access to plenty of the means from the fruit of his on-court labor, basketball remains the method for the player who should still be a senior in high school and who draws a number of laughs from teammates when asked to describe him when not driving the rim or pulling up from beyond the arc.
“He’s a great guy, just super, super chill off the court,” fellow freshman Kon Knueppel says. “He’s a pretty one-track mind on hoops. He takes care of his school work and he’s just a good guy.”
Flagg has been meticulously guided through his remarkable playing career, leveling up against older players from his early days picking up a basketball. That continued when he first got involved in USA Basketball and remains the case going into Saturday’s game against a Houston squad full of 20-something veterans.
Whether that is the final time he suits up in a Duke jersey remains to be seen. There is little doubt those watching on Monday night will still see Flagg—be it on a commercial or on the court. Then, he will prepare to stroll across the stage at June’s NBA draft to shake fellow Blue Devils supporter and league commissioner Adam Silver’s hand.
“Cooper is about to move on with something incredibly special with the next step he’s going to go after this,” Scheyer said. “Each guy is their own individual, so I think depending on the situation, guys should make the decisions for themselves. But Cooper’s thing is different. Cooper’s thing [the draft] … that’s going to happen, as it should.”
The road for Flagg in college basketball is on its last legs, but before it’s time for him to fully turn to the next page of his hoops journey, there’s still one last thing to accomplish.
If all goes to plan, that is.
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