Better Know an ACC Opponent: Duke

In case you’ve blissfully forgotten, the Pac-12 is dead and Cal is now in a conference named after the other side of the country. If you’re reading this, it means that this new reality is not a deal breaker for you. Over the rest of the off-season, we’ll profile each and every member of this conference that Cal has joined, that will definitely 100% exist it its current form for years if not decades.

Previously: Boston College; Clemson

Give me the basics

The university we now know as Duke was founded in 1838 under a different name, before a tobacco magnate donated a bunch of money and they changed the name of the school in honor of his family. Scholars have since debated whether a private university founded on railroad robber baron money is more or less morally objectionable than a private university founded on Tobacco money.

Stanford University has failed to launder their early reputation via a series of soulless VC tech disruptors. Duke has failed to launder their early reputation through a series of the most annoying basketball players to ever walk the face of the earth.

Do they have any relevant history with Cal?

Gee, would there happen to be an iconic picture associated with a Cal/Duke game that all Cal fans are familiar with? And that would become even funnier in retrospect when the antagonist in that picture eventually became the rage-meme head coach of Arizona State?

The 2^nd most prominent game Cal has played against Duke came in the 2^nd round of the NCAA tournament in 2010, when Jerome Randle and the Pac-10 champion Bears had the bad fortune of drawing a Duke squad that happened to be the best team in the country and eventual NCAA champion. Cal didn’t have anybody who had a prayer of matching up against Brian Zoubek, and the Bears fell pretty easily. But to be fair, so did pretty much everybody else until Duke finally got tested by Butler in the national championship game. Sigh, I loved that team, they deserved a longer run in March.

On the football side, Cal and Duke played a home-and-home back in the early 60s, when Marv Levy was struggling as Cal’s head coach. Cal lost on the road, then eked out a tie in Berkeley, and those two games represent the full sum of Cal’s football history against Duke.

You may remember me from such Pac-12 teams as:

This comparison probably doesn’t work culturally, because I have a hard time thinking that a small private university in North Carolina with fewer than 7,000 undergrads as much in common with a land grant public university in Tucson with 42,000 undergrads, but this is about athletics, and Duke and Arizona go together like two peas in a pod.

They are basketball behemoths with sky high expectations and the kind of talent that everybody else can only dream of. And while the rest of the nation will never hate Kerr Kriisa, Lauri Markkanen, T.J. McConnell and Kaleb Tarczewski the way they did Christian Laettner, J.J. Redick, and Grayson Allen, we west coasters know how close the comparison is.

And similarly, the Duke football team is usually somewhere between bad and unremarkable, but good enough that you worry about losing to them in a road game that will ruin your season.

I want to get on their good side. I should agree with them about:

That Duke basketball runs the Tar Heel State, of course!

I want to troll them incessantly. I should make fun of them for:

Um, UNC leads the all time basketball series, 145-117, beat Duke in the only Final Four game between the two rivals, and has one more national title than does Duke. So yeah, the actual Tar Heels actually run the Tar Heel state.

What should I know about their current coaches?

Jon Scheyer, former Dukie player, current Dukie coach, has largely picked up where Coach K left off without any trouble. In year 1 he was a game away from a conference title before winning the ACC tournament, then finished 2^nd in the ACC this past year ahead of an Elite 8 run.

Meanwhile, after seeing Mike Elko leave for Texas A&M, Duke grabbed Manny Diaz from Penn State’s staff to take over. Diaz has consistently built suffocating defenses as a coordinator but couldn’t get over the hump in three seasons as a head coach at Miami. Duke will likely be much more patient and he’s taking over a pretty solid defense, but Duke is also a very different place than Texas, Miami, or Penn State.

Former Tennessee great and Sacramento Monarch Kara Lawson took over Duke WBB in 2020 and has has back to back solid seasons. The Duke women have never quite reached the heights of the Duke men but are typically an NCAA tournament team that makes deep March runs every now and again.

Which alumni keep them stuck in the past?

Sonny Jurgensen is probably Duke’s most prominent football alum, having led them to two ACC titles and an Orange Bowl win over Nebraska before an NFL hall of fame career, which is a cool but pretty deep pull from the early annals of American football.

There’s obviously an embarrassment of riches on the basketball side, and Duke has retired a somewhat absurd 13 jersey numbers. By far the funniest, from a Cal fan perspective, is good ole’ Johnny Dawkins, he of the 66-78 career Pac-10/12 record at Stanford. I miss that guy.

Which alumni will they pretend they’ve forgotten?

He’s so associated with the Southern California (and, um, the crimes) that I had no idea that Richard Nixon graduated from Duke law school. Today I learned! You can also throw in Stephen Miller and Baylor scandal-maker Ken Starr to the list.

What’s their school tradition that they take way too seriously?

I’m supposed to use this section to make fun of something corny, but honestly I’d be so happy if Cal basketball tickets were always in such high demand that students camped out before games for primo spots on the bench. Let’s hope that Mad dog fever leads to that kind of passion in the future. Maybe, say, when a national basketball power from North Carolina visits Berkeley . . . ?

What non-revenue sport do they care about most?

Men’s lacrosse has made 13 Final Fours since 2005 and basically never misses the NCAA tournament. They don’t always win the ACC, because the ACC as a whole takes lacrosse really seriously, but Duke is still squarely among the elite in the sport.

Man, I love being in a conference that LOVES lacrosse and is ambivalent at best towards aquatics. Great cultural fit!

Should I go see Cal play a game there?

Well, if you’re at all interested in basketball, seeing a game at Cameron Indoor is often high on the list for any travelling fan. I don’t know how rowdy the crazies would get when Cal comes to town, but it’s tough to match the on court history.

Durham is just 45 minutes away from North Carolina’s capital, Raleigh, and is part of a metro area of more than 1 million people, so there’s plenty of restaurants, museums, historical sites and shopping, depending on your tourist preferences. And with the Raleigh-Durham airport smack dab in the middle, getting in and out should be pretty convenient. Plus if you’re lucky you can make it a two-fer and catch a UNC game at Chapel Hill, 30 minutes south west or Durham and 60 minutes west of Raleigh.

Is Cal better than them at sports right now?

Duke and Cal share something in common. Since 1962, Duke has won exactly one co-share of a conference title, and they lost the tie-break that year. Cal has probably been marginally more successful – after all, David Cutcliffe was an institution at Duke and went 77-97 across 14 seasons. But over the last two years Duke has been upwardly mobile and a QB injury cost them a chance to make a dark horse run to the ACC championship, so Cal might have a little catching up to do immediately.

Cal is not better than Duke in men’s and women’s basketball. Sigh.