DURHAM, N.C. -- North Carolina is in deep trouble. Hubert Davis is running out of answers. One loss is only one loss, but losing to Duke the way the Tar Heels did can be a tipping point, a point of no return.
A loss like this makes it OK to question fundamental assumptions. A loss like this destroys faith and removes the benefit of the doubt. There's nothing more clarifying than seeing how big the gap, with the only measuring stick that really matters, has become.
There's Duke and there's North Carolina and they may still be rivals but, at this moment, they are far from equals. If it felt like Duke was ascendant coming into this game and North Carolina was plummeting, everything that happened only confirmed that.
The Tar Heels at least put a varnish of respectability on the final score Saturday, but they were never in the game, not from the first possession. It was a grim demonstration of Duke's superiority. It ended up 87-70; it was effectively over at 40-13.
Forty. To. Thirteen. Duke was tripling up North Carolina with five minutes to go in the first half, the dominance almost disrespectful in its thoroughness.
"They whupped us," North Carolina's Seth Trimble said. "They kicked us. Right from the jump."
A year after North Carolina swept Duke (and N.C. State showed both up by making it to the Final Four, beating Duke twice along the way), the Blue Devils are utterly ascendant. The gap between the programs is as big as it has been in generations, in every respect: talent, results, recruiting, swagger. And coaching: Jon Scheyer has Duke moving relentlessly forward while North Carolina, under Davis, is rudderless if not sinking after a fourth loss in five games.
These things can be fluid. After losing out on Harrison Barnes and getting run off the court by a legitimately great UNC team in 2009, the last of Tyler Hansbrough's four wins in Cameron, Mike Krzyzewski plainly admitted that "we're not as good as they are right now." Duke answered North Carolina's national title that year with one of its own a year later. Such equilibrium has often felt inevitable.
But if the rivalry seemed to have been settled for posterity in 2022 when North Carolina spoiled Krzyzewski's Cameron farewell before ending his career in the Final Four -- the final cataclysmic battle for the center of the basketball universe -- it feels equally lopsided now, one program pushing for a national title, the other desperately hoping to find a backdoor into the NCAA Tournament.
After letting Wake Forest and N.C. State hang around long enough to threaten, Duke wasn't just on a different level Saturday, it played and saw the game at an entirely different pace. The Tar Heels couldn't keep up. Jalen Washington led the Tar Heels with six points in the first half. Duke's entire starting five had at least that many points.
Duke's on its way to a No. 1 seed and two potential weeks of virtual home games in Raleigh and Newark, an undefeated ACC season still within reach. The Blue Devils beat out two-time national champion Connecticut for the biggest recruit in years. Their roster is thoughtfully constructed to surround Cooper Flagg with complementary players.
And UNC? The Tar Heels are on a trajectory to miss the NCAA Tournament for the second time in three years. They lost at home to Stanford and nearly Boston College. They needed the final possession to beat Notre Dame and N.C. State and came into this game off a late collapse at wallowing Pitt. Saturday night, they never had the chance to fold. They weren't just beaten, they were outclassed. Humbled. Embarrassed.
Davis lauded his team's fight in the second half, but it was too late to matter. The last 30 minutes were just an excuse to get through ESPN's list of TV timeouts and pay the bills.
This entire season has had the ominous vibe of impending crisis for the Tar Heels, but it's here now, smothering and oppressive. It's one thing to lose to Duke. It happens. Being favored doesn't always count for much in this rivalry. Nor does home-court advantage.
But from the first play, when Sion James ghosted down the lane unobstructed, North Carolina was utterly unable and, worse, unequipped to meet the challenge Duke posed Saturday night.
"There's so much of the season still left to get better and to improve," Davis said. "The one encouraging thing for me is that I don't think we've reached our potential. That's out there. I've seen how good we can be on both ends of the floor. The consistency is the thing that is needed from this group. We have time and we have opportunity to move forward and be able to do that."
Davis paused. A spokesman cued the next question. But Davis wasn't done. He kept going.
"I love this team," he continued. "I love coaching this group. I believe in this team."
It felt like a preemptive defense of the criticism Davis knew was starting to boil over in the background. But the reality is this: There isn't much time left. There aren't many opportunities left. In Davis' first season, North Carolina lost to Duke by 20 in Chapel Hill, then lost only once until the national championship. But there was a sense of the miraculous to that, and expecting miracles to repeat isn't a plan.
Davis had as big a head start as anyone's ever had in this rivalry after booting Krzyzewski into retirement, but has since been lapped by the neighbors. And if there was a vague sense of that before Saturday night, the events in Cameron made it concrete. The growing discontent will spread from the social media and group texts where it has been cloistered into the mainstream, from message boards to boardrooms.
If you listen closely enough, you can almost hear the boosters agonizing, their complaints carried on the wind from Charlotte and Greensboro. They wrote all those checks for Bill Belichick, and now they're supposed to throw more money at ... whatever this is supposed to be?
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