bstrickland@heraldsun.com; 419-6671
Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski isn't one to make excuses for his team, but sometimes he will throw something out there as food for thought.
Krzyzewski did just that Wednesday night, looking back to the Blue Devils' 88-74 loss to N.C. State moments earlier while also looking ahead to tonight's challenge at Clemson (9 p.m., ESPN).
"They looked like a team that played at [noon] on Saturday, and we looked like a team that played in a war Sunday night, and we'll be in a war again Saturday night," Krzyzewski said.
"I think the conference is wide open. Who is healthy, who is fresh and when you play people, all of those things have to be taken into consideration."
Krzyzewski's not-so-subtle reference to the ACC schedule's lack of balance did get me thinking.
My first thought was that such unavoidable "inequity" wasn't that big of a deal. I thought that maybe an extra day off for one team in a given matchup might make a slight difference here and there, but I thought surely that type of thing would even itself out over the course of a 16-game schedule.
I thought wrong.
When the seventh-ranked Blue Devils (15-3, 3-2 ACC) take on the No. 17 Tigers (15-4, 3-2) tonight at Littlejohn Coliseum, it will mark the fifth time in Duke's first six ACC games that an opponent will have played its most recent game at least one day earlier than the Devils.
Then I figured that probably was just an anomaly at the beginning of the schedule, but as it turns out, it's only the beginning.
In a whopping 10 of the Blue Devils' 16 ACC games, their opponent will enjoy at least one more day off than Duke has heading into a matchup. Duke has the longer break twice, and the other four essentially are even.
How can that be? With every team playing two games most weeks, how could that possibly be so imbalanced?
Some of it is luck of the draw, but a lot of it is the price of success -- specifically the price of doing business for college basketball.
Television cameras are drawn to Duke, and the national interest in the Blue Devils puts them at the top of the pecking order for national games on ESPN and Fox Sports.
Duke plays 12 games on either ESPN or ESPN2 during the ACC portion of the schedule; UNC is a distant second among ACC teams with seven appearances (the Tar Heels, by the way, face ACC teams on longer breaks six times while entering four games on longer breaks themselves).
How does that impact time off between games? Because while Tuesday and Wednesday far and away are the most popular weeknights for ACC games, ESPN features 15 ACC games on Wednesdays but just four on Tuesdays.
As a result, there are three occasions when Duke appears on ESPN on a Wednesday before facing an opponent that played on a Tuesday.
And while most ACC weekend games are played on Saturday, Duke's prominence on Fox's Sunday schedule results in two occasions when the Blue Devils' opponent gets an extra day to rest and prepare. The first was Duke's loss at N.C. State on Wednesday.
The other five occasions can be chalked up to dumb luck -- sort of.
Tonight's game certainly qualifies. Even though ESPN heavily favors Wednesdays over Tuesdays for ACC broadcasts, Clemson happened make one of the ACC's rare Tuesday appearances this week, setting the Tigers up for an extra day off.
It was somewhat random for Duke's ACC opener against Clemson, as well, when both teams were coming off a warm-up nonconference game, and the Tigers just happened to play a day earlier.
The other three occasions are related to open dates -- or the lack thereof -- where luck plays a role along with a program's scheduling philosophy.
Most teams have two open slots on the schedule in the heart of ACC play, and while most take the break at least once if not twice, Duke does not.
As a result of breaks, both Boston College and Virginia Tech will have been off a week before hosting Duke. And when the Blue Devils visit Virginia, the Cavaliers will have had two more days off because of Duke's decision to play Tulsa instead of taking a break.
Players typically would rather play than practice, and the Blue Devils' nonstop schedule could help prepare them for the tight turnarounds in the NCAA Tournament.
But will Duke be worn down come tournament time? It's debatable what the game-specific and the cumulative effects of the Blue Devils' strange schedule really are, but with Duke facing more rested opponents so often, it has to have some impact.
So as it turns out, Krzyzewski had a point Wednesday when he said that N.C. State looked like the fresher team.
Or, on second thought: "We could have had a week off, and we wouldn't have beaten them tonight," Krzyzewski said.
