Dave Sez

I'll read it because the guy knows basketball, but he is incredibly biased.

He is basically right on this. Featherson fails to tell the reader that Coach K's best period in the conference by far, strangely begins in 1998, the year after Dean Smith retired. Do you think the two events might have been correlated?

Maryland filled some of the gap left by North Carolina, as did Wake to a lesser extent, but those programs were still looking up at Duke.

With Roy Williams back at Carolina, K has someone looking at him eye to eye. This is why, in my opinion, Duke is unlikely to ever again have a five year period like 1998-2002, where they lost 7 conference games in five years.

This is also why the obvious answer as to whether the pendulum is shifting towards North Carolina is yes. That is a ridiculous (in a a good way) achievement.

UVa had a similar run in the early 1980's going 13-1 and then 12-2 and 12-2 and Carolina had two diffeent four year runs in the 1980's with only 8 and 9 losses in conference, but neither quite matches Duke. NC State was 30-0 in 1973 and 1974 against ACC conference competition, including the tournament and the national championship. Although not as long a period of dominance, NC State's mark is superior to Duke's in many ways, foremost among things is that it came right in the heart of Dean Smith's tenure and included 9 victories in a row over Dean Smith coached teams that ended up winning 20 or more games.

Duke dominance was so great, that it makes one wonder how Duke only managed one title during those years and the few that followed.

Because so much of the tournament results are based on luck, it is possible that K was just unlucky. Indeed, many of the previous years Duke made the Final Four, such as 1994 or 1989, Duke seemed to be overachieving in the way Carolina did in 2000 just to get there.

But to be honest, had Smith ever lost large leads in the tournament as Coach K did in 1998, 2002, and 2004, he would have been raked over the coals by the media. This is without mentioning all the losses to clearly inferior teams like LSU, Michigan State and Indiana in the past several years. Only Kansas clearly was better among the recent Duke NCAA defeats.

In sum, K is a great coach. So, are Lute Olson,Tom Izzo, Bob Knight, John Calhoun, Roy Williams, Gary Williams, and Larry Brown, and so were Dean Smith, Denny Crum and John Thompson. Each of the above is fully as good a bench coach as K and many of the above were noted much more for coaching innovation than Coach K.

That stretch between '98 and '02 for Duke will go down in ACC lore as one of the greatest periods of dominance ever. Think of the two recruiting classes K landed in there. First you had Brand, Battier and Avery and then two years later, Williams, Boozer and Dunleavy. In between he landed Maggette. Overlapping on the front end, he had Carrawell and Langdon and then Chris Duhon on the other end.

That's an obscene amount of talent, probably even trumping Carolina's run in the early 80s.

It's interesting to note that both programs won just one national title in that time and the best team in each group ('84 Carolina and '99 Duke) failed to win. Another similarity is that during each run, another ACC team won a title ('83 State and '02 Maryland).

I'd never really thought that through before, but it's pretty interesting.

Probably the only reason why Carolina's numbers don't quite match Duke's is that Carolina had Virginia in there as another national power.

I think that Duke's guys from 1999 were more dominant when they were playing. Carolina's were excellent but we know that Kenny Smith (who almost went to UVa), Michael Jordan, Sam Perkins and Brad Daugherty all had outstanding pro careers, not to mention Joe Wolf, Steve Hale and Dave Popson, all of whom were as highly regarded coming out of high school as say Paulus, McRoberts and Hansbrough.

A lot of times people say that Duke and Carolina merely select who they want. The answer is more complicated. What is overlooked is that some guys are better at recruiting, whereas some coaches are better at evaluating talent. Bill Self seems to be a master recruiter, but a lot of his guys seem to turn out to be duds or he lets them transfer.

Dean Smith's ability to evaluate and obtain talent is mindboggling and I think Williams seems pretty good at it as well,not to mention Matt Doherty. Duke may have an advantage like Frank McGuire had. They seem to win much of the big city talent in the Northeast and Midwest among parochial schools and among players of more well off backgrounds. This was a point of contention with Smith who wanted the media to know that many of his players were just as intelligent as Duke's.

Nevertheless, Duke has had a clear advantage over Carolina in garnering European American talent and that started at the very beginning with Alarie and Bilas, Ferry and Snyder, Hurley, Laettner, McCaffrey, Parks, Collins, and Dunleavy, while Newton and Joey Beard didn't turn out and McCaffrey transferred. It may just be statistical noise, but Duke's white players, with the exception of J.J. Redick and Dunleavy have not been as prominent the last ten years as they were during K's first ten years.

Race doesn't matter in terms of quality of person, but Duke has some advantages that schools like UVa, Carolina and Stanford share, to a lesser extent, in getting talented kids from good backgrounds, such as Grant Hill and Danny Ferry, or a kid like Dunleavy whose father played for Frank McGuire at South Carolina. That won't change no matter who the coach is. The only period were Duke was pretty much down was from 1970-1977, when they were slow to integrate their team, probably not because of racisim, but more in terms of how to help kids be able to enter Duke and graduate from Duke.

With respect to the future, we will have to see who stays and who goes. I have watched a lot of Carolina teams since 1973 and I don’t see this current UNC team as being exceptionally talented with respect to having five players on the floor.

This is the deepest team that I have ever seen at Carolina, but if you pick their top five and match them against other line-ups besides the 2005 team from Carolina’s past, they should not strike anyone as being particularly impressive.

The 1998 team had Antawn Jamison, Vince Carter, Shammond Williams, Brendan Haywood, and Ed Cota. Jamison, Carter, Williams and Haywood have all had success in the NBA, especially Jamison and Carter.

The 1994 team had Eric Montross, Jerry Stackhouse, Jeff McInnis, Rasheed Wallace, Derrick Phelps, Donald Williams, Brian Reese and Dante Calabria, all of whom were highly recruited and several of whom had excellent pro careers both here and in Europe.

In 1984, Carolina had Michael Jordan, Kenny Smith, Sam Perkins and Brad Daugherty in its starting line-up, not to mention such highly recruited players as Dave Popson, Joe Wolf, Steve Hale and Buzz Peterson.

In 1976, Carolina had Mitch Kupchak, Walter Davis, Tommy LaGarde, and Phil Ford in its starting line-up. All four of them made the gold-medal winning Olympic team and all had success in the NBA, although only Davis played a substantial number of years as the others had injuries.

Smith coached 3 of the 50 greatest NBA stars of all time, in Cunningham, Worthy and Jordan. No one else coached more than two.

He had players such as Larry Brown, Charlie Scott, Bob McAdoo, Walter Davis, Bobby Jones, Mitch Kupchak, Tom LaGarde,Phil Ford, Mike O'Koren, Dudley Bradley, Sam Perkins, J.R. Reid, Scott Williams, Eric Montross, Jerry Stackhouse, Rasheed Wallace, Jeff McInnis, Antawn Jamison, Shammond Williams, Vince Carter, Rick Fox, and Hubert Davis, all of whom had ABA or NBA careers lasting 2 seasons or more and several of whom were all stars.

I agree that expectations are so high for these huge programs that often they are unrelaistic. However, it is not impossible for major programs to stumble for longer than the natural ebb and flow you refer to. See Indiana.

jackiemanuel wrote:

I agree that expectations are so high for these huge programs that often they are unrelaistic. However, it is not impossible for major programs to stumble for longer than the natural ebb and flow you refer to. See Indiana.

Yes, things do change over time - UConn wasn't always a national power - but nearly so fast as fans think. The traditional powers in particular have a ton of built-up inertia that keeps them near their place in the hierarchy. That's not to say that they don't earn their wins - they do - but it's just that fans tend to be very nearsighted when viewing their team's performance.

One thing that many of the coaches are doing is to, in a sense deliberately recruit down. They are looking for the best players available who are likely to stay for four years, either because they want a degree or because they have a style not likely to be attractive to the NBA. Ask yourself whether you would rather have Kenny Anderson or Stephon Marbury for one or two years or Bobby Hurley for four? I think that Carolina, in particular, did that last year with Green, Frasor and Ginyard and even maybe Hansbrough. They are good players but unlikely to leave Roy holding the back like two years ago.

Here's an article on Bobby Cremins, recruiting and the son of a Virginia Tech star who went under the radar of the ACC and ended up at Davidson:

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/columns/story?columnist=forde_pat&id=2787197&sportCat=ncb