Why Duke-UNC’s Final Four game could be the biggest in college basketball history

On Saturday, Mike Krzyzewski’s Duke will face the University of North Carolina in the NCAA men’s basketball tournament for both the first and the last time. It sounds improbable but it’s taken until the final season of Coach K’s illustrious career for these two bitter rivals to face each other on college basketball’s biggest stage.

It doesn’t feel that way because the two schools – separated by a mere 10 miles – have played each other 257 times, with every game treated as an epic clash between two giants. Duke-North Carolina has been called the biggest rivalry in college sports and has a genuine claim to being one of the most storied in all of US sports. The accompanying hype can become quite overwhelming, particularly when the athletes who decide it are largely unpaid teenagers.

Much of that hype comes down to the blunt fact that most of the country hates the Duke basketball program. It doesn’t matter that the Tar Heels lead their all-time series with the Blue Devils 142-115: Duke are traditionally the “villain” in this particular matchup. Much of this is down to the perception that the rivalry boils down to a bunch of preppy snobs facing off against scrappy regular Joes. Duke is a private institution while North Carolina is a public school. Duke have a habit of showcasing some of the most disliked players in college history, from Christian Laettner to JJ Redick to Grayson Allen.

It also doesn’t help that in the basketball world, Duke came to represent a certain type of white privilege. Writing for the Guardian, former NBA player Etan Thomas, who was briefly on the same Dallas Mavericks team as Laettner, summarized it as follows: “The understanding was that everything was given to Duke players, especially Christian