Tomorrow's game between No. 4 Virginia and No. 1 Duke is likely the most hyped game of the college basketball season thus far with College GameDay in Durham ready and waiting. The secondary ticket market shows how much hype there is: As of Friday morning, the cheapest ticket to get into the building on StubHub was going for a shade under $700.
Not only is this about who is the best team in the nation. Tomorrow’s meeting in Cameron should go a long way towards determining the ACC regular season title race as well as the chase for the top seed in NCAA Tournament East Region, with the Sweet 16 and Elite 8 games conveniently located in Washington D.C..
Yet this will not be the first meeting of its kind between UVa and Duke, nor will it be the last. In the literal sense, it won’t be the last because Duke comes to Charlottesville in a few weeks. Tomorrow’s game will be the third time since 2014 that Virginia and Duke will be ranked in the Top-10 and the fourth meeting in that span where both programs are ranked. Oddly, in 2016, Virginia was ranked No. 7 and Duke was briefly unranked but the game was very important to both teams nonetheless.
What we will see tomorrow is just another installment in what has become one of college basketball’s premier matchups annually.
There are two types of rivalries. First, there are historical rivalries that have gone on for decades with much of its drive by proximity and/or frequent meetings. Think Duke/UNC in basketball or Michigan/Ohio State in football. Then there are rivalries formed because of the stakes of the games played, usually because of how often the successful teams face off. For example, the Patriots and the Colts rivalry in the NFL during the Brady/Manning years. More recently, Alabama/Clemson has been the obvious example.
While they may not last forever, these sorts of rivalry games grab attention and headlines, provide fans with teams at the top of their sport, and eventually some bitterness between people on opposite sides that may not have been there previously.
And that takes us to this weekend and the new-found rivalry between Duke and Virginia. Make no mistake, UNC will always be Duke’s primary rival and no number of ACC titles or shot-clock violations forced by the pack-line defense will change that.
Miami football was once referred to as a “microwave dynasty” because of their sudden prominence in the 1980s after a forgettable football history up to that point. There are many parallels between that and Virginia basketball’s rise over the past five years. UVa hasn’t won a national title but the Cavaliers are nationally relevant in a way they haven’t been since the Ralph Sampson Era. They have found sustained success that has long eluded the program.
While UVa is not on Duke’s level as a program in terms of achievement and the Blue Devils own the all-time series with the Wahoos. But the UVa/Duke clashes of today are forming a new “microwave rivalry” in college basketball.
This isn't uncharted territory. The most obvious one that comes to mind Duke/Maryland, now a dormant series thanks to conference realignment. While this matchup was a byproduct of a time when every team in the ACC was playing twice a year, what brought this series to the surface was the quality of both teams. Duke fans were quick to point out then that Maryland is “not our rival” in the same way that UNC was and is, and they’re right.
But the Duke/Maryland series, particularly in the early 2000s, was intriguing and memorable while still having the level of vitriol needed to sustain a rivalry. In a regular-season meeting in late January 2001, Duke rallied to erase a 10-point lead with less than a minute remaining, led by Jason Williams’ late heroics that forced overtime and an eventual stunning Blue Devils win in College Park. And that wouldn’t even prove to be the most memorable Duke/Maryland game of that season: Duke trailed the Terps 39-17 at halftime in the Final Four and the Blue Devils stormed out of the locker room, stunning the Terps for the second time and eventually going on to win the national title 48 hours later.
Maryland and Duke were again among the nation’s best the following year, playing a couple of very important regular season games before both earned No. 1 seeds in the NCAA Tournament. The Terps didn’t have to go through Duke and eventually beat No. 5 seed Indiana in the title game after the Hoosiers upset Duke in the Sweet 16 the week before.
The Duke that clashed with Maryland at the beginning of the century is not quite the same program that the Cavaliers spar with today. Duke has produced far fewer four-year players this decade after those players were the cornerstones of Mike Krzyzewski's program for years. The Blue Devils have kept their program rolling by getting one good year out of blue-chip freshmen before they move on to the NBA. In fact, the way Virginia runs its program today under Tony Bennett is closer to how Duke operated in years past, with emphasis on developing talented but not necessarily NBA-bound recruits into multi-year starters.
Virginia’s veteran players, particularly its backcourt of Ty Jerome and Kyle Guy, are in some ways reminiscent of those four-year Duke players. Not only are they excellent on the court but they willingly accept the burden of the spotlight that comes along with leading one of the nation’s best teams in the nation’s best conference. Guy and Jerome are often the primary targets of opposing fans in road gyms, and they simply go out and play their game. The taunts and the haters on the road don’t bother them. In fact, sometimes they seem to revel in it. Sounds sort of like Duke teams of the past, right?
The big difference in the success of the two programs comes down to what has happened in the NCAA Tournament and everyone knows that. UVa has a pair of Sweet 16 appearances and one Elite 8 trip since Bennett got the program rolling, but also three first-weekend exits since 2014 including twice as the higher-seeded team. And of course, maybe the worst college basketball loss ever, not that anyone reading this needs a reminder. And while Duke has a pair of first-weekend NCAA losses during that time to lower-seeded South Carolina and Mercer, the Blue Devils won it all in 2015, something UVa has never done.
But despite having that hurdle, the Hoos have had sustained dominance in the ACC recently in ways that those great Maryland teams never did, and in a way that only Duke and North Carolina ever have. Since 2014, UVa is 77-17 in ACC play (87-21 if you count postseason results) and 159-33 overall. The Cavaliers have won three ACC regular season titles and two ACC Tournament Championships. During that same time, Duke has remained a consistent national power and surpassed Kentucky as the premier destination for the best players from the high school ranks. Duke is 157-43 overall during this span and 66-28 in the ACC. The Blue Devils have made it to the ACC Tournament final twice in the past five seasons, losing to Virginia in 2014 and winning the title in 2017, UVa’s worst year of the five.
Virginia has steamrolled most of the ACC during that time. Since 2014, UVa hasn’t lost a single game to Boston College (6-0), Clemson (8-0), NC State (6-0), or Wake Forest (6-0). Against perennial power and 2017 national champion UNC, the Cavaliers are 6-3 over the past five years, including splitting a pair of ACC Tournament championship games. UVa went 1-1 vs Maryland in its final year in the conference but has beaten the Terps in both of the regular-season matchups since. Louisville was brought in to replace them, and many Cavalier fans groaned when the Cardinals were made one of UVa’s “rivals,” meaning the programs would square off twice annually. But since joining the ACC, Louisville is 1-7 against Virginia. That rivalry may come some day, but for now the UVa/Louisville series has been completely one-sided.
UVa has a winning record against every team in the conference since 2014, except for one: The Wahoos are 2-4 against Duke, meaning that the Blue Devils are the only team in the league who have been beating the Cavaliers on a consistent basis since they took the conference throne. UVa won the only postseason meeting during that time, but their win in Cameron Indoor Stadium last year was their only regular-season win over Duke since 2013, when the Cavaliers were still a year away from their ascension. Duke is the only team in the conference that has gotten the best of UVa consistently. Virginia Tech has given the Cavaliers problems at times lately, and Carolina is always going to be a challenge, but the Blue Devils are Virginia’s “final boss.”
The series has been competitive and entertaining as well, a crucial component in creating a new rivalry. After years of Duke blowouts with the occasional close game thrown in, every meeting since 2012 has been decided by 10 points or fewer, and several by a possession or two. Almost all of them have been decided in the final minute of the game. UVa’s tight win in Durham last year helped heal some of the wounds from Grayson Allen’s buzzer beater against the Hoos in 2016, and the late barrage of points from Tyus Jones and the Blue Devils to shock the undefeated Cavaliers at JPJ the year before.
Virginia lost a late lead at Cameron in 2014, and avenged it with a classic in the ACC Tournament final that year. That game has probably faded from the memory of many Duke fans who are accustomed to playing meaningful games each March, but the triumph will be remembered by Wahoo fans as one of the greatest moments in program history. Not unlike how Maryland fans view their unexpected ACC Tournament title run in 2004 as the No. 6 seed, which ended in an upset win in the final over the top-seeded Blue Devils.
What happens on the field (or court) of play is the focal point of any rivalry, but what happens off of it often helps to build the tension. Maryland was UVa’s primary rival in the conference for years, and it’s fair to say that there’s not a lot of love lost between those two fanbases. The environments between the Hoos and the Terps were often hostile, even this season when UVa went to College Park for a relatively low-stakes late November ACC/B1G challenge game. Many Maryland fans lamented leaving the ACC and familiar rivalries for their new conference, and it’s still brought up by Terrapins fans today. And despite the fact that their series has gone dormant, Maryland fans still despise Duke, and Blue Devils fans probably feel similarly despite marking the Terps as a “less-than” rival.
Virginia fans often can’t agree on who their own rivals are. Many discount the rivalry with Virginia Tech because of their history, and the fact that for so long they weren’t a conference rival, which means a lot more in basketball than it does in football. But that sentiment is changing with time, and the tension in JPJ on Tuesday night shows that. Older Virginia fans usually regard UNC as a primary rival, but if you polled UVa fans under 40, it's a safe bet they would say that Duke is their most despised team in the conference in a landslide.
For years UVa fans have circled Duke games on the schedule as opportunities to take down the league’s Darth Vader, and it was more of a chance at a resume-building upset than a true toe-to-toe rivalry game. But now Cavalier fans see those matchups with Duke as winnable games, with all of those bad feelings towards the Blue Devils still at the surface.
And it’s hard for Duke to ignore Virginia now too, as they probably did for years with the Cavaliers struggling with mediocrity over nearly two decades. Duke students started a GoFundMe page to get former UMBC point guard K.J. Maura to Saturday’s game, in an attempt to rattle Virginia’s players and remind them of a result that they surely haven’t forgotten. UVa's guys are no doubt aware of the attempt, and Kyle Guy even seemed supportive of it, perhaps as further motivation to go into Durham and win. UMBC coach Ryan Odom requested that Maura not attend, so instead the Cameron Crazies will resort to their famous taunting sheets which will surely feature many references to UVa’s loss to the Retrievers last March. The Crazies are famous for their chants, but inviting Maura seems unprecedented, and should serve as further evidence of a budding rivalry on both sides.
It takes distaste on both sides to make this happen. That was no doubt the case in the Duke/Maryland series. And while Virginia fans won’t like being compared to Maryland, it’s probably fair to say that Duke fans have a growing dislike for UVa’s more-confident fans, the team’s style of play, and really their success in a league they used to dominate annually.
Virginia and Duke go about their program building in very different ways, with the same ultimate end goal, to build something that lasts. While good teams come and go but good programs sustain. And despite their different styles, recruiting philosophies, and histories, or maybe because of those differences, the Cavaliers and Blue Devils are a perfect rivalry for right now.
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