A funny thing happened over the last few years as the Blue Devils jetted to Beantown and South Beach in search of ACC victories in football and basketball.
The Duke-N.C. State rivalry died.
The Blue Devils haven't played the Wolfpack in football since the Red Sox were still cursed. And the last time the basketball teams met twice in the regular season, Luol Deng was a resident of Bassett and not Kobe Bryant's newest crush.
Expansion, and the kinks that came with teams entering the league at different times, has completely sapped the local rivalry of its luster.
Although there was certainly a lot of skepticism and outright criticism in the years just before conference expansion, everyone since has accepted it without much analysis of its effects.
The surprising success of Virginia Tech and Boston College in basketball has even appeased those who believed the title "Best Hoops Conference" was being gambled for the sake of football.
But the significant scheduling drawbacks everyone saw coming have played out, and the Duke-N.C. State rivalry has been perhaps the most notable victim.
The Blue Devils and Wolfpack never approached the level of Duke-Carolina or even UNC-State, but there is a lot of history between the two, compounded by some natural rival elements. The schools are 30 minutes apart, more people in North Carolina are State fans than are Duke fans, and State supporters on the whole even outpace the Tar Heel faithful in their view of Dukies as elitist outsiders.
In football, the games have been competitive. Between 1991 and 1994, the two teams played three games that were decided by one point each. Even in their last matchup in 2003, Duke almost knocked off the Philip Rivers-led Wolfpack, which ended the season by winning the Tangerine Bowl.
Basketball games were almost always nail-biters when Coach K and Jimmy V matched wits. And in the 2003 and 2004 seasons, the teams fought in several tremendous bouts, including the 2003 ACC title game in which the Blue Devils came back from 15 down in the second half.
And then there was Julius Hodge. The Wolfpack star who always had plenty to say fueled the fire in 2004 when he pontificated on the Cameron Crazies following a 76-57 loss at Duke. "There's no way I could let a guy with a 4.5 GPA, acne and bad breath decide the way I'm going to play on the court," he said.
There is, however, a larger point to this discussion. Before expansion, the ACC wasn't just about the depth of the most premier rivalries, it was about breadth of rivalries among teams within the conference. And that has suffered as a result of the constraints of scheduling in a larger league.
The symptoms of weakening conference rivalries may be beginning to show, even if the average fan or player doesn't recognize them for what they are.
For example, the Cameron Crazies have been criticized recently for their decline in creativity when taunting ACC opponents. In the Crazies' defense, it's easier to remember, or even get dirt on players when they come to your gym every year.
Maybe it's not the line policy that needs to be overhauled. Maybe it's the conference scheduling that does.
The ACC basketball schedule is locked- in through 2011, and Commissioner John Swofford said the policy will be revisited sometime in the next few years to see if the league should opt for an 18-game conference slate. The Big East, Big Ten and Pac-10 have done this already.
Adding two ACC contests would change the system so that each team would have three partners that it would play twice every year and two groups of four with which it would alternate between playing once or twice. With that schedule, Duke would never go more than a year without having a home-and-home with each conference foe, including N.C. State.
In the meantime, the oft-forgotten Tobacco Road rivalry has some hope for revival. The basketball teams have a home-and-home series for the first time since 2004, and they are predicted to finish second and third in the conference. Add to that the fact that they are coming off a year when the Wolfpack handed the Blue Devils their first-ever Thursday ACC Tournament loss.
And the football drought shouldn't happen again either, as the division system ensures that the teams will play every other year. Still, that means each class will see just one home game against the Wolfpack.
The bottom line is that the ACC needs rivalries like Duke-N.C. State. The Blue Devils can only play the Tar Heels so many times each year. And if the league can't rebuild those mid-major rivalries, we'll start to see the real price at which expansion money came.
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