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I think it's interesting they have all arisen and/or re-arisen at the same time (let's not forget Northwestern had some good teams in the past) but I'm not certain about the reasons why. Duke has always been a basketball school and had no trouble admitting players that there's no way would pass normal admissions and that's not a special thing. Even though it's a well kept secret, Stanford, NW, Duke, Vandy, all use special admits just like every other school in the country - there's only 7 schools who have no formal special admit policy and none of them are who you might think and not having a special admit policy doesn't necessarily mean they're not using special admits (they're just using it differently). However, special admits aren't exclusive to athletes and are used for many reasons.

Many schools have special admits for rich students: LINK

The reason for all of this is that admissions isn't a cut and dried kinda thing and it never will be. Admissions is arbitrary so arbitrary that I've seen professors write notes and boom a student was in grad school.

Oh yeah, schools like Duke and Vandy definitely stretch the admissions rules when admitting players from the money sports. I mean, there's a basic standard all players have to maintain regardless of school, and some schools are more difficult to hack than others, but with the academic support system in place at pretty much any major university, even marginal students can get by if they really want to.

As I said, my theory is half-formed, but, in a way, that kind of speaks to it. In times past, there wasn't nearly the academic and informational support at both the high school and college level that there is now, so that makes it easier for tough schools to bring in players they might not otherwise have recruited in the past. This is especially true for football, where the number of players and need for resources are so large that it really required a far more substantial network than basketball, with fewer players and, let's face it, slightly fewer meatheads.