Thanksgiving at Duke

This Thanksgiving, on national television, we will get to watch the latest chapter in the Greg Hardy saga play out. A man who committed unrepentant acts of domestic violence, scooped up by a narcissistic vulture of an owner for the greater glory of his investment, shielded by the weakest of claims of concern and vetting. But hey, Cowboys games on Thanksgiving are a tradition, and the show must go on.

This Year's College Football Highlights So Far

Things I am thankful for thus far this college football season:

1. No game has been described as "the game of the decade/century". Seeing as we've gotten an average of about six a year of those so far this millennium, that's a marked improvement.

On the Miami Miracle

Let us leave aside for a moment the sheer blissful irony of Duke fans up in arms about an undeserved call going another team's way and costing them a game. (True story: I once watched a Duke basketball game with a Duke alum who literally did not know what a foul was.) This, my friends, is called "karma", and it looks fabulous on you.

True Confession: Why I'm Rooting For Duke

Confession time: my bracket got blown up in the first game of the NCAA tournament (No, I'm not counting the nonsense in Dayton). I'd picked Iowa State as a dark horse for a Final Four run, based on their remarkable, unflappable drive to the Big 12 championship and their ability to rally from double-digit deficits. So naturally they got ambushed by the University that Ate Birmingham and went out 40 minutes into the whole shebang.

Your ACC Football Breakdown: Week 1

Week 1 of college football season generally exists for two reasons. One, to find a small-school cream puff you can whup up on without fear of losing, buffing the record and providing what's really a glorified scrimmage to start the year. These games have the added advantage of allowing coaches to work all those pesky 1-game disciplinary suspensions of key players out before anyone with a pulse comes calling. Justice, such as it is, gets served, but only in the form of an Oscar Meyer Lunchable.

Number two, which is generally a bit rarer, is to provide a team with a chance to play a quality non-conference foe. This technique is used by teams with national championship aspirations who want to burnish their strength-of-schedule rating, or by an up-and-comer team without reasonable title hopes for whom a "good loss" is still useful.

ACC Football Preview. Sort Of.

Because it's that time of year again, and the local airwaves are buzzing with talk of ACC football. In truth, there's more reason to do it than most years, seeing as how A)last year was a remarkably successful one for the conference and B)they've just added an actually good football team in Louisville, and Notre Dame has started keeping a change of clothes and a toothbrush at conference HQ while still insisting that they're just friends with benefits.

On The Exit Of The Turtle

For the past few weeks, you could hear it building.

All the ACC folk, cheerfully circling Sunday's Virginia-Maryland tilt at the end of the ACC regular season. Anticipating with pleasure the thought of a resurgent Virginia taking Maryland to task for the grievous sin of leaving the conference. Hoping out loud that the Terps' last regular season game would be a whupping of epic proportions, with league champion Virginia standing in for Duke and Carolina to do the honors. That Maryland would be ushered out of the league it was abandoning with an epic loss.

The Boeheim Freakout, Reconsidered

One of the more interesting tropes I've come across recently is the notion that Jim Boeheim's freakout against Duke was a result of him being unable to handle the unfamiliar pressure of Cameron Indoor Stadium. Presumably it was this, and not an iffy blocking call, that caused Boeheim to go completely monkey @#$#nuts all over the refs while performing a half-Magic Mike.

To which, after due consideration, I can only say "nope".

Your Weekly ACC Football Update: Thank God It's Over Edition

Precisely one game in the ACC mattered: Duke beat a resurgent UNC team - barely - to win the Coastal Division and punch their ticket to the conference championship game next week, wherein without intervention from either the Divine or Florida law enforcement officials, they will be turned to chutney by Florida State.

(Note: Duke fans, please don't even pretend to get upset here. Duke is a wonderful story and a much better team than anyone had a right to expect this year. But scraping past the Wake Forests and UNCs of the world - the same teams FSU beat by 50 or so - is indicative of a slight talent gap. Whatever happens in Charlotte, it's going to be ugly.)

Your Weekly ACC Update: Duke Brings The Pain Edition

They are now running commercials on local sports talk radio where they talk about Duke football bringing the pain.

Duke football. 

As in "good seats, still available". As in "this is the first time ever - EVER - Duke has been bowl eligible in two consecutive seasons". 

Your Weekly ACC Roundup: Arr, Pirates Edition

And so, week 5, with the drama of an in-state rivalry that only one side wanted to play...

Why Your Team Won't Win the NCAAs, Part II

Picking up where we left off yesterday...

Team: Duke

Biast

Not the Plumlee-McAdoo matchup.
Also, biast.

A little while back, I wrote a piece about attending a Duke-Carolina basketball game at Cameron Indoor Stadium. It was not my first college basketball game, but it was my first Battle of the Blues, and it was my first trip to Cameron.

By our standards, it got a lot of hits. Some of those came courtesy of a link posted on reddit by a friend of the blog, and with that came...commentary. Sad, angry commentary, especially from one dude (and really, you'd expect a self-proclaimed grad student in statistics to be able to construct a better argument) who dismissed the whole thing out of hand because (and I'm paraphrasing here):

1) He claimed I made the notion of "cheat sheets" for cheers up, because he'd never seen one.
2) The listed stats for Mason Plumlee and James Michael McAdoo make their tussle look like less of a physical mismatch than it was.
3) Where he sits, people in the stands don't behave the way I said they did.
4) I implied that "the Cameron Crazies" and "the student section" were the same thing, instead of explicitly stating so.

To which I can only respond:

1) They do exist, as evidenced by every other commenter in that thread.
2) The listed heights and weights for Plumlee and McAdoo might be close, but anyone who's ever paid attention to sports knows you can trust the "official" stats like you can trust Pravda's latest report on a UFO landing in Murmansk.
3) How this guy - who claimed to be sitting in the grad student section - knows what the folks were doing in the nosebleed seats better than someone who was sitting there does is beyond me. I'd also like to introduce him to the woman who told my father "If you want to watch the game, go downstairs", presumably to the grad student section where people were sitting down.
4) My bad. Next time I'll be clearer.

Now as amusing as it is to see someone two steps away from recording a tearful YouTube video demanding "YOU LEAVE PLUMLEE ALONE!", what's really interesting there is the perceived need to defend Duke and Cameron against even the slightest hint of disapproval. To claim prejudice (spelled interestingly there) against poor, oppressed Duke. To suggest that anyone not already intimately familiar with all the customs and rituals shouldn't be going to a game there.

Now, if you read the piece, you will come across the tidbit that as a Boston College (GS of A&S '94 With Distinction, ThankYouVeryMuch) alum, I have no dog in the Duke-Carolina fight. I certainly didn't come in rooting for anything other than a good game, and I tried to write about what I saw and experienced there. A lot of folks, including some Duke alums I know, said nice things about the piece, and one even bothered to take time to teach me one of the chants. 

But still, there's "this guy was prejudice and misinformed about his visit" presumably because I should have fudged my reporting of the Plumlee-McAdoo tussle to seem like more of a fair fight. (Trust me. It wasn't. Put these two next to each other and it's like Bert and Herry Monster)  There's the need to take any less-than-glowing words about the beloved team as a personal insult, and to react accordingly. Sometimes it's by posting kvetches on reddit. Sometimes it's by claiming earth-shattering bias at the tiniest perceived slight. And sometimes it's just being a jackass to anyone who doesn't love your team as much as you do.

Side note: "Biased", of course, is not to be confused with "biast", which is also commonly referenced but which actually refers to the unique lower back anatomy of the Marvel comics supervillain Bi-Beast, who once notably fought the Hulk atop the SHIELD helicarrier. It should also not be confused with "baised", which is probably some sort of cooking technique, and not to be confused with wrestling legend Ted DeBiase. But I digress.

Here's something very simple: if you reflexively take every less-than-absolutely-adoring word written about your favorite team and decide that it is evidence of "bias" or "prejudice", you need help. If you cannot accept the slightest possibility that someone might have a well-reasoned or observed viewpoint that runs contrary to yours without immediately jumping to the assumption that they have an ulterior motive, then you're out in "the US is using a weather station in Alaska to threaten Bob Woodward" territory. The difference is in details, not in approach. 

So if you find yourself doing this - if your first reaction to a piece that includes your favorite team without consisting exclusively of hosannas of praise, you need to take a deep breath, look in the mirror, and ask yourself, "Do these guys, many of whom will make more money by age 25 than I will in my life and none of whom will ever know my name, really need me to defend them? "

Also, "Why am I looking in the mirror and talking to myself."

If you're really a fan, you're in for all of it - the good, the bad, and the what-can-get-better. To not want to hear anything critical is the sports fan equivalent of eating only candy; nothing that tastes bad, sure, but you're sure as hell gonna be surprised when that vitamin B deficiency kicks in. So eat your vegetables. Calm the hell down. And while you're at it, pick up your cheat sheet. It's real. I promise.

In Which Coach K is Consistent

Last night Virginia beat Duke. Virginia's home fans rushed the court. Duke coach / Polish Yoda Mike Krzyzewski was extremely unhappy about this and, apparently, traded some f-bombs with some Virginia fans. Krzyzewski said afterward that he was concerned about his players', coaches', and staff's safety in the crush.

People are giving him crap about this.

But I have to admire the man's consistency.  When Duke beat NC a few weeks ago, Krzyzewski stopped Duke's fans from rushing the court (by gesture and shouting):

So this isn't merely a case of "don't rush ME if I lose." Good on 'im.

Et Tu, Testudo?

So Coach K. is mad that Maryland is leaving the ACC. Mad that they're going to the Big 10. Mad that they're walking away from a conference they helped found in 1953 (by breaking away from the Southern Conference). Mad that they're abandoning the long-time rivalry.
He's right to be mad, of course. That's a lot of tradition for Maryland to be abandoning for the promise of a paycheck and regular exposure on the Big 10 Network. I applaud Coach K.'s stand that teams should not leave their conferences, that they should not abandon their long-time rivalries for filthy lucre, and they should not leave the conferences they helped found behind.
And I look forward to hearing Coach K. re-iterate these sentiments next year when founding Big East member Syracuse comes to Cameron Indoor Stadium as part of its initial season in the ACC.

In the Cauldron of Cameron

Mason Plumlee, practicing telekinesis

So.

Duke-Carolina tickets.

I did not attend Duke. I did not attend North Carolina. My rooting interest in the ACC, such as it is, lies with Boston College, a school whose unseemly departure from the Big East I still find annoying and who, despite being closer to the actual Atlantic Coast than any other school in the conference, still gets crap for not belonging. (Dear Georgia Tech: It's a long drive from Atlanta to the beach. Trust me on this one.)

I won the tickets in a charity raffle. "You gonna sell them?" my coworkers asked. "They're going for six hundred a piece on StubHub."

I thought about it. I may be a writer, but I can do math, and that's a lot of money.

But it was Duke-Carolina. I've been living in the Triangle for thirteen and a half years. During that entire time, the sports conversation has almost entirely been dominated by Duke-Carolina. Carolina-Duke. Zellers and Montrosses and Duhons and Stricklands and Hensons and, God help us all, the occasional Zoubek. State, yeah, sure, it was there, but really only so people could chant "Herb Must Go" ironically or otherwise. No, it was the War of the Blues, something that seemed transcendent.

I'm never getting to a Super Bowl. I have no interest in the BCS championship game, or the Masters'. The AAA Championship Game I'd taken my nephew to was a rain-soaked flogging. The World Series seems an impossible dream, and the Olympics, well, I'd been in Atlanta in 1996 and they were largely a traffic nightmare.

But Duke-Carolina. To go, to take my father - who had never been to a college basketball game. That would be something.

Dad was feeling up to it. That decided me. We'd go.

***

Walk into Cameron Indoor Stadium for the Carolina game as a stranger, and you will be lost. This is a place of ritual, of carefully prepared chants and behaviors, of fluttering championship banners like shrouds for hapless opponents, of ritual call and response. Everyone who belongs there knows the proper answers. Everyone who belongs there knows the times and the places and the words to say. And you realize after a while, that this is not a basketball game. It is a sacrifice, with Coach K as high priest and a liturgy of thunderous catcalls, and Carolina is on the altar.

Right about then is when, if you don't have a dog in the fight, you start rooting for Carolina. Because it's always nice to see the underdog survive.

***

Duke's tactics are simple: wear you down. Make you run through pick after pick after pick. Play hard, physical defense (and offense), and push up to the line of what the refs will call. If that line budges an inch, push that inch further. Of the five guys on the floor for Duke in the last minute tonight, four had four fouls.

That's what happened to UNC tonight. They got tired. They got worn down. The jumpers that they were popping free for in the first half started falling a little bit short. Enough Mason Plumlee elbows in the solar plexus and it starts affecting your shooting stroke. And when those jumpers stopped going in, then Duke picked up the game and ran away with it.

The final differential was 5. It really wasn't that close, not in the end.

***

Mason Plumlee is Shaq moves in a Brad Miller body. His best play is to get the ball down low, then repeatedly drop his shoulder and square his elbow into the gut of the man guarding him. Watch carefully and you'll see him practicing his "I've been fouled!" face even when no one's within five feet of him. You can't blame the kid; it works, especially when he's up against a pipe cleaner like James Michael McAdoo.

When he gets to the NBA and tries that move, though, Dwight Howard is going to turn him into a pretzel.

***

The hardest working people at the Duke-Carolina game are the Duke cheerleaders. They are out there every time out, handspringing their way up and down the court with fearless and reckless abandon. One young lady managed thirteen consecutive during a television time out; I can only assume that if she hadn't had her way blocked by one of the baskets, she would have just kept on going.

***

Sound is a physical thing at Cameron. It comes at you in waves, roaring around the building again and again. It starts in the Crazies, wells up in the student section and whips around and around until it rises to the upper deck, populated by middle-aged men in tan slacks and their sons and wives. It hits the walls hard enough to bruise, bounces off the ceiling and comes crashing down on itself. The chants get muddied until it's all one wild roar, hammering your eardrums and making your sternum throb in time.

I know there's words in the chanting. They hand out carefully prepared cheat sheets to the Cameron Crazies. But by the time the sound has finish boiling itself into a maelstrom, it all sounds like "WAAAUUURRRRGGHGHHH". It's a unified "WAAAAUUURRRGGHGGG", but it's a "WAAAAUUURRRGGHGGG".

***

Attending a game at Cameron Indoor forces you to become a jerk. At every Duke basket, the crowd surges to its feet, and stays standing until the resolution of the next Carolina possession. If you do not stand, your view of the game looks suspiciously like the back of someone's knockoff Seth Curry jersey. If you do stand, congratulations, you've become a jerk by blocking the view of the people behind you. Who will now stand in order to see, which will block the view of the people behind them. And so on and so forth, up until you get to the very last row, and you bang your head on the rafters.

I saw the game with my father, who is not necessarily built for standing for a couple of hours on end. Nor is he set up for a synagogue-style up, down, up, down. So he sat. So I sat with him. As a result, large portions of Duke's decisive run early in the second half looked a lot like the back of someone's shirt.


***

Duke won by 5. They made a run about ten minutes into the second half, and when it was over they were up by 6 and Carolina's jumpers were clanging off the rim. The Heels shot two airballs in the second half, clear signs that these guys were just exhausted, but this year Coach Roy doesn't have the horses, and the big guns had to stay out there. Duke pushed the lead to 8, and that's pretty much where it stayed down the stretch. The game ended (after a little debate over a particular basket counted), and the fans streamed forth into the night, cheerful and exhilarated. Downstairs, the student section erupted out towards a rumored bonfire; the Cameron staff was friendly and polite and their shuttle service down to the handicapped lot where we'd parked was ridiculously efficient. As we rode down, a chopper flew overhead. "Probably looking for the bonfire", the driver cracked. Everybody laughed.

***

Love is blind.

The guy sitting in front of me is one of those fans who believes the next foul his team commits will be its first. Every Duke possession, he's up and shouting "Aww, come on!" at the refs while making the universal symbol for "hack" - right hand chopping down just above left wrist - so often I start wondering if he's actually David Byrne.

But that's fandom, which is love. The object of your affection is beautiful and perfect. All those who strive against it are twisted and corrupt.

And love, like the refs, is blind.

Duke-Carolina

Yes, they're real

For once, I will not be rooting for a meteor to hit the stadium.

Unless it's a very, very small meteor and it's going to buzz Dick Vitale.