The North Carolina and Duke home and home series is the greatest rivalry in college basketball. There is no doubt about this. By recent custom, this series is the showdown between the two dominant conference powers. Since the 2003 season when a Josh Howard-led Wake Forest team took home the regular season title, Duke or North Carolina has taken home a piece of it every year since, and most years before that. It’s understandable for people to get lazy and talk about how this is the game between the two conference heavyweights, to claim that this is the series that decides the ACC regular season championship. It’s understandable, but it is lazy. More importantly, this year, it’s simply wrong.
Florida State sits on top of the conference standings and the Seminoles hold the key to their own destiny. They clobbered North Carolina, they beat Duke at Cameron Indoor Stadium, they beat Mike Scott and the Virginia Cavaliers. To walk away with the number one seed in the tournament, Florida State has to simply win out. Sure the Seminoles still have to face Duke and Virginia again, but the second place team in the ACC, North Carolina, has to play both of these teams twice down the stretch. Statistical wizard and game simulator extraordinaire Ken Pomeroy ran down the chances for either team to win the conference outright and found the Tar Heels had a 41% likelihood, while Florida State had a 39% chance. Since these simulations don’t account for a tie situation, which Florida State wins because of the head-to-head tiebreaker, Florida State really could be “legitimately considered the favorite.” North Carolina is by no means out of the race, but right now they are in second place and Duke’s shot at winning the conference regular season title is pretty slim.
North Carolina and Duke transcends simple conference standings. The game is about pride and rivalry more than conference dominance. It does usually mean conference dominance, but ACC fans need to give credit where credit is due: Florida State, to this point in the season, has been the best team in the conference. This game is a great rivalry game but today it is not a battle for conference supremacy. It’s a consolation game for the conference runner-up.