Countless numbers of high school basketball players dream of playing college hoops at one school and one school only — Duke.

Fortunately for Kansas University, senior power forward Nick Collison — the third-leading scorer in KU history — was not one of them.

“I definitely was not a fan of theirs but didn’t hate them like some people do, either,” said Collison, who grew up far from the Durham, N.C., school in Iowa Falls, Iowa. “A lot of my friends liked Duke because they get a lot of attention. They are on TV more than anybody. I had friends who talked about how fun it would be to play at Duke.”

Collison was the envy of those friends when he made a campus visit to Duke during the first semester of his senior year.

It was on that trip that coach Mike Krzyzewski offered Collison a scholarship.

“I thought he was a good guy. He was classy in the recruiting process,” Collison said of “Coach K” who has compiled a 590-174 record in 23 years at Duke heading into Thursday’s Sweet 16 battle against Kansas (8:57 p.m., The Pond in Anaheim, Calif.) “They did a good job recruiting me.”

Collison ultimately decided to follow in the footsteps of fellow Iowan Raef LaFrentz at KU and not Christian Laettner at Duke.

“They told me a lot of things like they always do in recruiting,” Collison said of Duke coaches comparing him to other players. “At Duke they tell you you have all this freedom. You can basically do anything you want out there. If you believe everything they tell you, it’s probably the best place to go.

“When you see what they’ve got and look at it from the outside, you see it might not be everything they say. I like what coach (Roy) Williams said. He said, ‘You earn the freedom you get by showing what you can do.’

“As a high school kid, I can definitely see how people can get caught up in a lot of that. They (Devils) make you think it’s the place to go.”

KU's Nick Collison has his shot blocked by Duke's Carlos Boozer. The Blue Devils defeated Kansas, 69-64, in the second round of the 2000 NCAA Tournament at Winston-Salem, N.C. The teams will meet again Thursday in the Sweet 16 at Anaheim, Calif.

Collison isn’t trying to imply Duke misled him in recruiting.

It’s just that he knew with Elton Brand, Shane Battier and Chris Burgess already on the roster, minutes might be a problem as compared to Kansas.

“I think at Duke they will give you opportunities to do things,” Collison said. “If you don’t do them right away they’ve got other guys they count on to get it done.”

Duke even had other big guys in mind while recruiting Collison. KU’s All-America candidate grinned when recalling his phone call to Krzyzewski informing him he’d chosen KU.

“Actually, when I called to tell him I was going to Kansas, he was like, ‘I don’t care. We got a commitment from Casey Sanders anyway,'” Collison said of Sanders, a 6-foot-11 senior from Tampa, Fla., who averages 4.6 points and 5.2 boards a game compared to Collison’s 18.5 scoring, 9.3 rebounding marks.

“I don’t know if the offer was still there. I’m glad I came here. I’m sure I’d have been happy at Duke if I went there. They’ve won a national championship, but we’re trying to get that done this year, too.”

Williams, who has lost a batch of players to Duke in the past — Battier being the biggest name — was glad he defeated the Devils in the race for Collison.

“Nick Collison is the only player we’ve ever gotten that Duke wanted,” said Williams, who recruited current Devils Sanders, Daniel Ewing, Shelden Williams and Shavlik Randolph, plus former players Battier, Thomas Hill, Ricky Price, Eric Meek, Trajon Langdon and Chris Carrawell.

“To be honest, this was one of the few times location was helpful. His family wanted to see him play,” Williams said of Collison. “We did a nice job (in recruiting), but we’ve done a nice job and lost a lot of kids that went to Duke.

Duke, Williams said, has some big-time recruiting advantages.

“They have no holes,” he said. “Academically they are one of the leading institutions in the country. We’ve gotten better at getting those top quality students. The first couple years it was really hard getting those kind of students. Jacque Vaughn was the breakthrough for us.

“For many years those people said we didn’t compare to ’em academically. The ACC Conference, the media centers they have with Atlanta and Washington, D.C., up and down the East Coast where they still think we go to class in covered wagons. The perception of Kansas is not as good as it should be.”