Traffic bait, mailing it in or outright promotion. You be the judge.
Pat Forde, who is obviously trying to get back on Erin Calipari’s good side, did a little top ten of college basketball rivalries. No brainer right? UNC-Duke #1 and then whoever else. Not so much according to Forde. In fact Forde argues that UNC-Duke has not been up to snuff in recent years and there are others that have superseded it.
The biggest rivalry news of 2009-10 is that the rivalry in college hoops isn’t so hot — at least in relation to its own molten standards.
Duke-North Carolina will still make a whole lot of people hyperventilate when they play two or more times this season. But not the way basketball fans will lose it in the state of Kentucky (when Louisville plays the Wildcats) or in other parts of the Southeastern Conference (when Tennessee plays Kentucky) or in the Big Ten (when Michigan State plays Purdue). Right now there are at least three rivalries you have to rank ahead of the annual Blueblood/Eight Miles Apart/Roy versus K hypefest.
First off, what constitutes the rivalry slowing down or cooling off? The fact UNC has dominated it? Funny that ESPN had no trouble trumpeting all things UNC-Duke when Duke was rolling the Heels during the Doh years and the immediate aftermath. Stakes are not high enough? The past two seasons have seen UNC and Duke play with the ACC regular season title on the line. UNC needed to win in 2007 to claim a share of the title and avoided dropping to the 5th seed in the ACC Tournament. In 2005, UNC was also playing for the ACC regular season. In 2005, 2008 and 2009 an NCAA #1 seed was being dangled in front of the two teams. And from a personal perspective the UNC-Duke games, especially the one in Chapel Hill this season, made me far more anxious than any other game UNC played this past season, the NCAA title match-up included. So from a fan perspective and from the perspective of what these two teams are playing for, I am not following the logic as to why UNC-Duke is taking a backseat to anyone much less three other rivalries.
Now, I can see where there is some merit to the UK-UL discussion though I think the fact these two 0nly play once and the game is in December takes an edge off. Nothing is at stake in December but fan pride. Since these two teams of from separate conferences, it has zero impact on potential conference finishes for the teams in question. Yes you have two red hot personalities coaching the two teams now, one of whom used to coach the other team. John Calipari has touched off a recruiting arms race in Lexington and Rick Pitino is going to be challenged. In other words there is merit to the argument in attempting to equate UK-UL to UNC-Duke but is UNC-Duke taking enough of a hit with the current state of the roster in Durham to warrant demoting the rivalry beneath UK-UL? I supposed that remains to be seen which is really the greatest flaw in the piece. Forde is extrapolating what these rivalries might look like in the upcoming season which is fine and I might be willing to give him UK-UL for one season.
However, there is no way on earth you can convince me MSU-Purdue and UK-UT trump UNC-Duke. Heck, UNC and Duke could both be below .500 and they still trump MSU-Purdue and UK-UT. In terms of the latter, UT men’s basketball is still the 3rd best show in Knoxville. UT men’s basketball is below women’s basketball for fans at UT and they both take a backseat to the football team. UT has only been seriously competitive in men’s basketball on an elite level for about four seasons now so it is not as though we are drawing on some grand history. I am sorry, but I just do not see Tennessee vs Kentucky as being this grand rival game that causes the sports world to pause like UNC-Duke does. As for MSU-Purdue, it seems like it is out of left field. MSU and Purdue are the cream of the crop in the Big Ten so when they play this season and probably into the forseeable future the games will be high stakes. That being said, it is still Big Ten basketball not to mention the fact that while Michigan and Indiana do border each other, the two universities in question are four hours apart. Add to that the fact that I am thinking Indiana fans comprise are larger part of the basketball fan base in the state than Purdue does. Maybe Dean Forever or Detroit Heel can correct me on this but I was not aware nor do I believe MSU-Purdue will cause “basketball fans in the Big Ten to lose it” for this game. Nor can that possibly be the case with a Kentucky-Tennessee matchup. UK-UL maybe but I know for a fact that UNC-Duke still has the market on their respective fans “losing it” when those two get together.
Let’s call this what it really is: Promotion. Pat Forde is wasting a column in the middle of the summer to establish these games as big rivalry games because in all likelihood, ESPN will televise all of them and they need it planted in the collective consciousness of college basketball fans that this is the case. ESPN, like Gary Parrish and Jeff Goodman also have a serious Calipari fetish right now. Forde has not been so much a Calipari sycophant but maybe he is coming around. At any rate, this is about ESPN trotting these games out at various points during the season and promoting them as being huge games with massive rivalry implications. The problem is they are not, save UK-UL which leads me to ask one basic question. If these three are so much better rivalries than UNC-Duke why doesn’t ESPN promote any of them during their much vaunted Rivarly Week? According to Wikipedia, UNC-Duke is the only one that makes the cut.
Rivalry Week is a week of programming by ESPN devoted to showing the top rivalries in college basketball. Games that are annually shown during Rivalry Week include:
- Duke vs. North Carolina
- West Virginia vs. Pittsburgh
- Missouri vs. Kansas
- Syracuse vs. Connecticut
- Oklahoma vs. Oklahoma State
- Villanova vs. Saint Joseph’s
- Kentucky vs. Florida
- UMass vs. Temple
- Maryland vs. Duke
- Ohio State vs. Michigan
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I would actually put Duke-Maryland second, after Duke-UNC. Most of the great rivalries are in college football. There is not a single other basketball rivalry even close to Duke-UNC in the entire country, now that UNC-NC State has receded in importance.
Kansas-Missouri is probably closest in terms of antipathy but Missouri has been iffy as a team since the early 80’s.
Let’s look at football: Army-Navy, OU-Texas, OSU-Michigan, Alabama-Auburn, USC-UCLA and on and on.
reading the espn comments, it appears 90% of fandom agree Forde is nuts.
Champoinships, history, wins, recruiting, clean play, pro draftees, so what?
Ahem.
Yeah. Clearly other teams also factor in ACC rivalries. WFU have been really a challenge this decade. NC State have been traditionally a big rival as well.
This kind of writing is more suited to the pro game. Maybe he should concentrate there.
Can someone explain to me how K made the rivalry go from “good to great” when Heyman-Brown and “8 points in 17 seconds” — among other things — happened well before he showed up on the scene? (For that matter, I’m not sure why it’s a “rare happening” for Carolina to own the dookies during the Coach K era.)
I think Pat Forde just needs to go ahead and stick with college football writing. He knows it better, which might explain why a lot of the so-called “hot rivalries” in his column are football rivalries.
At least I know now that Vitale & I have something in common, that the UNC/Duke game is where its at, while the others seem to be distancing themselves from it (not fans of course).
I live in Louisville. The fans here are passionate about their college sports. No question about it. That said, there is NO FREAKING WAY that even the fans here take the UL-UK game as seriously as Carolina-Duke. NO FREAKING WAY! Yes, they talk about it in the papers and on sports talk radio, but in the end everyone knows that the game bears little significance to either team’s season other than for bragging rights. If you ask me, they get more excited for the UL-UK football game (much more excited!) than they do for the basketball game. Because of the nature of college football, that game tends to matter much more.
Carolina and Duke are routinely playing for the ACC Title and/or the #1 seed in the NCAAs. There are some good rivalries around the country and UL-UK is one of them. However, Pat Forde is out to lunch if he thinks it holds a candle to Carolina-Duke.
DSchwind,
It’s hard to argue that Coach K’s ascendancy in the mid-80s certainly took the rivalry to another level. There were great moments in the rivalry up until that point, but I remember as a kid in the early 80s believing that State was Carolina’s main rival. I guess it wasn’t until the ‘84 ACC semis, and then two years later when #1 Carolina played #3 Duke to open the Dean Dome, that the rivalry in my opinion was clearly took on a new level. By the late 80s there was no question, with the J.R. “I Can’t” Reid stuff and the brutal ‘89 ACC Final (not to mention State’s precipitous decline).
I’m not sure how Forde can have Kentucky in his top 5 twice. To me, you have your arch rival, and then there is everybody else. You can’t have 2 “most hated” rivals can you? That alone tells me that his list is bogus.
I also take exception to his dook has the “better gym” statement. Based on what? Sweltering temperatures, limited seating, outdated facilities? Sure it’s louder and it’s cool that the students get to sit by the court, but the Dean Dome is still one of the nicest places to play basketball, and it is over 20 years old. He mentions better fans too, so I assume that he means in Cameron. The # of UNC fans dwarfs that of dook, and I’d bet that the average Tar Heel fan is more rabid than the average dook fan, based on demographics alone.
I will second Matt Privett.
I think the rivalry was second to the Case/McGuire rivalry in the 50’s, got really huge in the 60’s, but then receded due to USC becoming the conference bad boys and then NC State dominating the conference and beating Carolina 9 times in a row, while Duke was in free fall for 7 years after Vic Bubas left.
Both games in 1974 were classics, but sort of meaningless, particularly the 17-second game which had no effect on anything. UNC got annihilated the next Friday by Maryland in perhaps the worst thrashing Dean Smith ever took in the ACC tournament, although 1992 was pretty ugly too.
I would say I thought about Duke sort of the way I think about State now. Don’t overlook them because they want it more than we do, but they just weren’t very good. I think even Dean Smith has said that State was the main rival at this time.
Bill Foster then restored Duke to parity with NC State as a rival but he didn’t stay long and Duke pretty much plunged the first couple of years under K, while Terry Holland and Virginia became the most hated. It was UVa, in fact, that made it to the Final Four in 1984 to our great chagrin, when we had one of our best teams ever. Tom Sheehy was the Shane Battier of the era.
In fact, my freshman year in 1984, I don’t remember the game in Durham even being televised, although it could have had to do with the later aborted pay per view scheme that Raycom had come up with. I remember being shocked at how close it was and how we had to struggle to win, as I learned the name Tommy Amaker for the first time. The second Duke game that year, that went into double overtime where Doherty hit the great shot to tie, was spring break week-end and I honestly don’t remember many people planning to shorten travel plans to stay in Chapel Hill, of course it didn’t take that many to fill up Carmichael.
By the next year, however, I remember getting up at three in the morning to do the ridiculous “line up” charade for tickets, which I got, for the last Duke-Carolina game in Carmichael. I am sure it seemed easy by current Duke standards, one morning of lost sleep on a Saturday night, but that was the hardest I ever had to work for seats, (since I was not particular about location because they were all pretty good in Carmichael) but, hey Duke had not even been selling out during the early 80’s so they can’t feel too smug.
I think the rivalry really went up another notch in 1988 with SAT-gate and K’s Final 4 string and pretty much put all the others behind it, once and for all, particularly with the demise of Valvano, and Driesell and Holland leaving, who had also each been spirited opposition. I also think that students who had been a bit lackadaisical in the early and mid-80’s because UNC had recently won a title, were shocked back into competitive mode by Duke’s successes in the late 80’s. I thought 1986 was a lucky blip but by 1992, we were being eclipsed as top ACC program and danger always makes a rivalry even more bitter. Smith beat back the first challenge, but by 2004, we obviously had been eclipsed, which led to the greatest game in the history of the series in March 2005, at least for UNC.