Duke looks to return to accustomed spot in Sweet 16
East Regional | Edge: Duke-Texas
GREENSBORO, N.C. -- The Duke Blue Devils won an NCAA tournament game late Thursday.
By a wide margin.
Convincingly.
And, yes, this qualifies as big news.
"It was good to start like that," Jon Scheyer said after helping the Blue Devils to an 86-62 victory over Binghamton. "This is what we expected."
Just not what they've been getting.
Sure, Duke is still among the nation's great basketball programs thanks to a Hall of Fame coach and multiple McDonald's All-Americans; anybody who tells you otherwise is either uninformed or insane.
But the reality is that the Blue Devils entered this NCAA tournament with a 1-3 record in their past four NCAA tournament games, and the average fan no longer views them as the team that won back-to-back titles in 1991 and '92. Rather, Duke is the team that lost to a lower-seeded Connecticut team in the 2004 NCAA tournament, a lower-seeded Michigan State team in the '05 NCAA tournament, a lower-seeded LSU team in the '06 NCAA tournament, a lower-seeded Virginia Commonwealth team in the '07 NCAA tournament, and a lower-seeded West Virginia team in the '08 NCAA tournament, meaning the average fan has labeled Duke as either an overrated program or an underachieving program.
Take your pick.
Either the Blue Devils have been overrated the past five seasons.
Or they've underachieved the past five seasons.
Those are the only options the average fan will put on the table, and so it was with that mindset that the nation tuned-in late Thursday to watch a game between the ACC tournament champions (Duke) and an opponent making its first trip to the NCAA tournament (Binghamton). The hope from the anti-Duke crowd was that the Blue Devils might be tested, might struggle, might need last-second heroics from Gerald Henderson to save themselves from an embarrassing loss, you know, just like last season.
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| Mike Krzyzewski: 'Overall, I'm really pleased with our performance.' (AP) |
"Overall, I'm really pleased with our performance," Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said. "And no one was hurt, so it's off to Saturday."
And then off to the Sweet 16?
Used to be, that was a simple question to answer because Duke once made Sweet 16s as easily as Tiger makes cuts. The Blue Devils did nine in a row from 1998 to '06, but that loss to VCU ended the streak in '07, and that loss to West Virginia prevented another from starting in '08.
Now, the Texas Longhorns will try to extend Duke's streak of opening-weekend losses Saturday night here at the Greensboro Coliseum, and if they succeed the constant discounting of Duke's regular-season success will continue into next season, when AP poll voters rank the Blue Devils in the preseason top 10 only to watch fans mock the poll while calling Duke the "most overrated" program in America.
It won't be true, of course.
But that'll hardly matter.
In this sport, what a school does for three months is inconsequential if it's not validated in the annual three-week tournament used to crown a champion, which has never made much sense to me.
Regardless of what happens Saturday, the Blue Devils will still be a team that finished with the nation's top-rated RPI while playing the nation's top-rated schedule, a team that won 11 games against fellow NCAA tournament teams before the Selection Show even began. That's impressive, I think. But most fans don't think like me, and most fans despise Duke. So if the Blue Devils want to avoid such criticism they must do one very obvious thing, and look good while doing it.
That thing?
Win Saturday.
And start another streak of Sweet 16s.
