Let me start this by saying I don’t know a whole lot about the UNC/Duke cultural dynamic. I’d imagine I know more than the median college basketball fan, but there’s a lot I don’t know. So, here are my priors for all this. If they’re wrong—well, shit. But here we go. My perceptions:
- UNC is a lot cheaper than Duke for North Carolinians. In-state tuition and whatnot. Actually, scratch the whatnot. Just in-state tuition.
- UNC occupies the place of Michigan or Washington or Virginia in its state’s public school landscape: better school, more resources, at least a little stuck up compared to the industrial and/or ag school in the state.
- But, UNC is absolved of this in the public consciousness by 1) being consistently more relevant athletically than NC State and 2) possessing the world’s greatest foil: Duke. Duke, being private, well-endowed (financially, I mean), and pretentious as all getout, is so easy to hate that UNC’s hateability is rendered contextually insignificant. You can like UNC in the state of North Carolina without being, relatively speaking, a cake-eater. This is an advantage that Michigan, Washington, and Virginia fans lack.
Putting all this together and knowing in the back of my head that UNC’s pretty tough to get into for out-of-state kids (one of my high school friends tried, and did it!, and went to Kansas), I think it’s safe to say that somewhere in either Charlotte or The Research Triangle or maybe Washington, DC there’s a pair of friends who went to UNC and Duke who argue about which school is better academically. It’s obnoxious. It’s meaningless. It’s a cake-eater thing to do, but again, the UNC friend’s getting away with it because they didn’t let NC State in the room. The Duke friend is citing things like admission rate and earnings potential and U.S. News and World Report rankings. The UNC friend is citing affordability and value and probably one of those scholarships like the Rhodes or the Fulbright where maybe UNC has more (work with me here, and yes, this UNC strawman is really annoying me too, which is why I support UNC-Greensboro as my state-of-North-Carolina team and I hope they don’t get embarrassingly overseeded again in this year’s NIT). It’s possible this argument isn’t happening, but it’s also possible it is, and it’s at the very least possible that a lot of UNC fans would like it to happen but don’t have all the fodder they need yet. So let me give them that fodder. Right now.
UNC fans seem to understand the NIT way better than Duke fans do.
It’s not that complicated. There’s a variable number of automatic bids, which throws people off, but the premise is simple: the 20-24 teams who are decent but not known as “good” make the field (not the best teams, but the right teams, as Herb Brooks would want it). It’s a narrow window, which is a lot of what makes the NIT such a good tournament. Not just anybody makes it, as feels the case in a certain rival tournament that takes 68 teams, many of them downright bad. To make the NIT, you need a poorer résumé than 45 or 50 teams, and a better résumé than 275 or so teams. That’s how it works.
Duke fans don’t seem to get that.
As many of you know, I spend a few minutes most days scrolling through tweets that included the hashtag #NIT. A bit of housekeeping, considering that hashtag is my home. And you would not believe the number of Duke fans who think UNC is going to the NIT just because they aren’t going to that other tournament. It’s mind-numbing. These people don’t get it. In a triangle named for research, these fans aren’t looking up how many teams make the NIT. They aren’t even going through the logic of looking at the ACC standings. I mean, I get that when your basketball program is irrelevant for as long as Duke’s has been, you don’t keep up with the system, but come on, guys. You’re just looking foolish. Meanwhile, UNC fans are couched in their optimism. “the #NIT…if that,” they say, recognizing that all NIT plans are but dust in the eyes of the fates (not butt dust—those are plans for the other tournament), and further recognizing that realistically, you can’t lose by 17 to Wake Forest and make the NIT in 2020 without a lot of good wins alongside that loss.
Make of it what you will. Your opinion is your own. But mine is that Duke must not be that great a school, because those snobs have no idea how the biggest global sporting event goes down. UNC fans do. And that counts.
