SAN ANTONIO — Cooper Flagg is in the baggage claim at the San Antonio airport, on a video board hawking New Balance. He’s larger than life on the walls of AT&T’s interactive court at Fan Fest, shooting, screaming, flexing. For a month, he’s popped up as often as Charles Barkley during nearly every basketball-adjacent commercial break — New Balance, AT&T, Gatorade — whether Duke is playing or not.

At some point, Flagg’s corporeal form may even actually play basketball here.

As Flagg’s single year at Duke comes to a close on the biggest stage in the sport, with the Blue Devils playing Houston in Saturday’s late semifinal, the freshman superstar is the first college basketball player to be marketed like his imminent NBA peers, a process that started before he even arrived on campus.

It’s a very 2025 story, the natural progression of college athletes’ ability to capitalize on their name, image and likeness, the collision of a new era and a generational star, at a time when both college athletes and brands have become comfortable with each other.

It’s an interesting moment to be a college basketball star. After decades when they had to not only refuse commercial opportunities but pretend they didn’t exist, anyone and everyone can cash in. But no one has cashed in like Flagg.

“That’s just kind of the game and the opportunity that college players have in this day and age,” Flagg said. “It’s business, then it’s basketball. You have to be able to kind of decipher through and figure out and keep basketball the most important thing. Obviously it’s the first thing.”

So Flagg has a full portfolio of television ads: An AT&T commercial with his grandmother, a New Balance commercial with Kawhi Leonard, Tyrese Maxey and Cameron Brink, and a Gatorade commercial with JuJu Watkins and Paige Bueckers, as well as a photo campaign modeling hats for New Era.

For Duke, helping a player like Flagg make the most of his commercial opportunities has become part of the recruiting pitch, just as it was for the Boozer twins, arriving next season.

“It’s really mostly about what works for Cooper,” Duke basketball general manager Rachel Baker said, “because the best version of Cooper is what works for Duke.”

And as his year in residence nears an end, there’s no question it has worked for both Flagg and Duke — and not just on the basketball court, where the Blue Devils made their first Final Four under Jon Scheyer and are two wins from a national title.

“My kids saw the AT&T one before I did, so I had to Google it to see it,” Duke athletic director Nina King said. “I’m just proud that these guys have these opportunities. I’d love an opportunity to be in a commercial.”

A new star for a new era

When state legislatures effectively changed the NCAA’s rules on NIL over the NCAA’s objections in 2021, one of the straw-man criticisms was that endorsement money would distort locker rooms in team sports if some players got more attention and more opportunities than others.

It certainly hasn’t played out that way. Instead, players have generally been happy to see their teammates rewarded, like D.J. Burns profiting from his instant stardom during N.C. State’s run to the Final Four a year ago. And if there was ever a team where one player’s fame so outshined that of his teammates, it would be Flagg and Duke.

You couldn’t cook up a better test case in a lab, yet the opposite has been true.

“At the end of the day, for our guys, they’ve all had amazing opportunities,” Scheyer said. “I don’t think anybody is coming away empty-handed.”

So while Flagg’s teammates might joke about the No. 32 necklace he wears — “I don’t think Maine wants to claim that one,” Kon Knueppel said — the commercials are not an object of ridicule, only admiration and appreciation.

“We make fun of him for plenty,” Sion James said. “The commercials are cool, though. To be on an AT&T commercial with your grandma? You can’t make fun of him for that. You got to love it.”

Flagg’s teammates do poke fun at the New Balance commercial where he shoots hoops in his driveway until a paperboy delivers a copy of “The Maine Daily News” that has a front page reading only: “Cooper Flagg, the Intelligent Choice.”

“Guys say that to him,” Neal Begovich said. “The intelligent choice.” And Flagg’s appearance in the Gatorade commercial? “Kind of ‘look at me!’ ” Knueppel said, dismissively.

But everyone loves the AT&T commercial where a sweaty, flexing Flagg wins at bingo and high-fives his grandmother — “Mammy,” who’s wearing a sweater depicting a screaming Flagg — and the rest of the bingo hall on his way to collect his prize.

“The AT&T one’s so good, the bingo one,” Stanley Borden said. “I know his grandmother, we’ve spoken on a number of occasions. I asked her, ‘You made the sweater initially, are you getting a licensing deal?’ ”

Even Duke’s opponents had to acknowledge, it’s not bad.

“The AT&T one was pretty cool,” Houston’s Ramon Walker said. “I liked that one. What he’s done to put himself in the position to get all that stuff, he’s reaping the benefits of his work. That’s just kudos to him.”

Balancing basketball and business

On3 estimated the value of Flagg’s endorsement deals this season at $4.8 million, behind only Texas quarterback Arch Manning among college athletes. Becoming that kind of ubiquitous presence has left Flagg treading a very fine line between overexposure and capitalizing on his stature as college basketball’s biggest star. (Flagg’s agent at CAA, Austin Brown, did not immediately reply to a text message.)

“Myself and his family and CAA were completely aligned on him wanting to keep basketball the most important thing,” Baker said. “When you do everything through that lens, we can evaluate the threshold where something is too big for him to pass up and then what he needs to be able to focus on — basketball and school and being a kid.”

Part of that is talking about how an athlete like Flagg can leverage Duke’s social media presence — what Baker called “the Duke effect” — to grow his own profile, along with the use of Duke’s trademarks and branding. That’s suddenly a hot-button topic on campus after the university objected to the appearance of a Duke T-shirt in an awkward moment of “The White Lotus,” but not an issue with Flagg.

“It’s all those parties working together and understanding the priorities, what he wants out of his personal brand, combined with the Duke brand,” King said. “I’m so grateful for the relationships we have. We’ve been communicating with all of them since Day 1.”

But that’s the way of the college basketball world now. Creating a favorable marketplace for a star athlete is as much a part of the recruiting pitch as anything actually related to basketball. It’s why Duke hired Baker away from Nike in 2022 specifically to oversee that process.

What worked for Flagg may not work for everyone — and few players are ever going to be in as much demand as a 17-year-old as Flagg was — but Duke can certainly sell the infrastructure it built around him to future recruits.

If it had been that way in 2019, would someone like Zion Williamson have returned to Duke for a second season, as he later said he would have liked? It might be difficult to put together an NIL package more financially lucrative than what the No. 1 pick in the NBA gets, but not impossible.

A star of that stature willing to delay entry to the NBA — and to be clear, no one was or is discussing this with Flagg, who is mentally and physically ready to go to the next level — could do very well for himself, as women’s stars like Bueckers and Flau’Jae Johnson have done without the same professional riches on offer.

Whatever Williamson would have made as a freshman in the NIL era, he could have increased that by an order of magnitude if he had come back as a sophomore.

“That’s why he’s getting paid back damages,” King said, referring to the impending potential settlement of the House lawsuit against the NCAA. “That is the what-if, for sure. But we’re in this moment now, and I’m glad that this current and moving-forward group has this opportunity.”

Not everything, however, is negotiable. Flagg is playing in Nike, not New Balance, because Duke’s deal takes precedence over his own, one of many compromises along this road.

“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. “So just respecting the rules that are in place and kind of what we have to follow.”

That does not mean he can’t share that wealth with his teammates, though.

“Cooper and I are about the same size, so he’s always asking me if I want something,” Begovich said. “But I haven’t cashed in yet.”

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