Which NCAA men’s teams to watch on the bubble before March Madness
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Sports Pulse
Few things in the world matter less than which college campus ESPN chooses to broadcast its college basketball pregame show from.
Still, it was curious last weekend when the network announced that its final “College GameDay” of the regular season would visit Chapel Hill to hype up Duke vs. North Carolina for the second time in nine weeks.
Yes, the game is important to North Carolina, which probably won’t make the NCAA Tournament without a win. And yes, Duke is fighting for the No. 1 overall seed with a must-see player in Cooper Flagg, who will almost certainly be the top pick in June’s NBA draft.
But if you’re trying to tell the story of this college basketball season, it doesn’t make much sense.
This is admittedly a small nit to pick with the so-called Worldwide Leader. “College GameDay” does not have the cultural relevance in basketball that it does in football; it’s filler programming that frequently draws fewer than a million viewers. And leaning on the Duke-UNC rivalry is such an easy button for ESPN; it has hosted GameDay on the last weekend of the regular season for 12 of the last 13 seasons.
The problem, though, is that the entire competitive balance of college basketball has shifted dramatically over the last decade. Highlighting Duke-Carolina again and again and again – even when it’s not a particularly relevant game to the national picture – feels like a restaurant unironically serving Salisbury steak and Jell-O. It might be time to update the menu.
Without question, the biggest rivalry showdown Saturday will take place between Alabama and Auburn, two top-10 teams who played a delightfully watchable game last month that ended with Auburn scoring a huge 94-85 win. Either of those teams could win the national championship.
But there are other big games, too, between Final Four contenders: Kentucky at Missouri, Ole Miss at Florida, Houston at Baylor and St. John’s at Marquette (which isn’t a GameDay candidate because the Big East doesn’t have a contract with ESPN).
Picking any of them would have made sense and sent the message that ESPN isn’t going to put Duke-UNC in the spotlight by default at the expense of more deserving games with more relevant storylines.
If Duke-UNC is going to continue being college basketball’s preeminent rivalry, it can’t live in the the past. It has to earn that juice.
Right now? I just don’t see it.
Locally, of course, this game will always matter more than anything else. But for a national audience, the fascination with Tobacco Road wasn’t just about the branding or the uniforms or even the success of both programs. It was the personalities involved.
While Jon Scheyer has done as good of a job as possible maintaining Duke’s place in the competitive landscape, there is simply no way to replace the aura of seeing Mike Krzyzewski on the sideline coaching against Dean Smith or Roy Williams. And from the North Carolina perspective, it’s hard to know whether to mock Hubert Davis for being outmatched as the head coach of a traditional blueblood or to pity him because he seems like such a nice, earnest guy.
From the 1980s all the way until Krzyzewski’s final game – a loss to North Carolina in the 2022 Final Four – that edge between the two programs was undeniable. It was personal. And it easily translated to viewers who didn’t understand anything else about either of the two schools.
You can’t just take Krzyzewski out of that mix and recreate the same stakes. When the Tar Heels upset Duke in that Final Four semifinal, their elation wasn’t just about beating Duke or making the national championship game. It was about beating him.
Are we really supposed to believe that North Carolina players think it’s the same thing to beat Jon Scheyer? Do you really think Flagg, an 18-year-old who grew up in Maine, has spent his nine months on Duke’s campus building genuine animus toward North Carolina?
It’s illogical. It’s fake. This rivalry may one day become great again if the Tar Heels can get their act together, but it’ll never be the same. And college basketball writ large can’t continue to ride on its shoulders by appealing to the past.
This is a very different sport now compared to those decades when you could reliably count on Duke and North Carolina to play the biggest games every single year because they were both usually great.
Baylor – Baylor, for goodness sakes – has won a championship more recently than either of them. SEC football powers that used to not take basketball very seriously are dominating the top-15. The ACC, once considered the gold standard, is at one of the lowest points in its history. Indiana, which is in the middle of a coaching search, is about to learn the lesson once again that its success under Bobby Knight has little attraction for the top established coaches.
In this sport right now, tradition isn’t worth very much, and interest in a rivalry is hard to maintain without both schools doing their part.
When these two schools met on Feb. 1, Duke gave the Tar Heels such a thrashing that the 87-70 final score didn’t really do it justice. And yet as ESPN concludes its regular-season college basketball coverage, it is once again shoving the matchup down its viewers’ throats like it’s the Yankees and Red Sox.
Some fans will argue that Duke-UNC is always the most compelling matchup in college basketball – or perhaps any sport – regardless of rankings or results.
But that’s just hanging on to the past in a sport where the competitive balance is not static. There are more interesting teams than ever before, schools we’re not used to seeing at the top of the rankings and a crop of dynamic coaches at out-of-the-way places like Texas Tech and Missouri who deserve to be on that pedestal.
That’s the real story of college basketball this year. By comparison, the one ESPN is offering this weekend feels tired and unearned.
