Duke’s Cameron Boozer received the 2026 Naismith Men’s Player of the Year award on Sunday after his impressive freshman season with the Blue Devils. He beat out Kansas’s Darryn Peterson and BYU’s AJ Dybantsa, his fellow star freshmen, for the award. These three players are expected to be selected No. 1, 2 and 3 in June’s NBA draft, though the order is still very much up for debate ahead of the draft lottery.
Boozer winning the Naismith award means a Duke player achieved this milestone in back-to-back seasons (Cooper Flagg won last year). But, it also means that Christopher Columbus High School in Miami swept the two major men’s college awards this season. A fellow alum of the high school is none other than Fernando Mendoza, the Indiana quarterback who won the Heisman Trophy before winning a national championship in January.
