In the NCAA Tourney. Factually speaking, this is true. Read all about it here.
The perennial collapse of the Duke University men’s college basketball team in the NCAA tournament is a consistent source of solace to freedom-loving Americans everywhere. Duke is a remarkably hateable program, thanks to its consistent legacy of decent teams and its legacy of hateable players, from Bobby Hurley to Grayson Allen. So when Duke fails to meet expectations in the NCAA tournament, as it usually does, real American patriots in all 50 states spend the next 24 hours celebrating.
With South Carolina’s victory over Duke on Sunday, those patriots are celebrating now.
What made the South Carolina win particularly enjoyable to people with good taste was that they weren’t supposed to win. They were a 7-seed, supposed to lose to the 2-seeded Duke. But the Gamecocks prevailed, fairly easily, upsetting the favored Blue Devils.
That really shouldn’t be a surprise, though. Over the past three decades, no team has suffered more NCAA tournament upsets than Duke.
It’s important to differentiate between real and on-paper upsets. A real upset is something like that South Carolina game, where Duke was five seedings higher than its opponent. An on-paper upset is like what happened to Miami against Michigan State; the latter was a 9-seed to Miami’s 8-seed, meaning that, basically, they were equivalent.
Using data from Sports-Reference.com, we tally 20 upsets of the Duke Blue Devils since the 1985 tournament, including 14 that were against opponents more than one seeding away from them. That’s easily the most total upsets over that period.
The perennial collapse of the Duke University men’s college basketball team in the NCAA tournament is a consistent source of solace to freedom-loving Americans everywhere. Duke is a remarkably hateable program, thanks to its consistent legacy of decent teams and its legacy of hateable players, from Bobby Hurley to Grayson Allen. So when Duke fails to meet expectations in the NCAA tournament, as it usually does, real American patriots in all 50 states spend the next 24 hours celebrating.
With South Carolina’s victory over Duke on Sunday, those patriots are celebrating now.
What made the South Carolina win particularly enjoyable to people with good taste was that they weren’t supposed to win. They were a 7-seed, supposed to lose to the 2-seeded Duke. But the Gamecocks prevailed, fairly easily, upsetting the favored Blue Devils.
That really shouldn’t be a surprise, though. Over the past three decades, no team has suffered more NCAA tournament upsets than Duke.
It’s important to differentiate between real and on-paper upsets. A real upset is something like that South Carolina game, where Duke was five seedings higher than its opponent. An on-paper upset is like what happened to Miami against Michigan State; the latter was a 9-seed to Miami’s 8-seed, meaning that, basically, they were equivalent.
Using data from Sports-Reference.com, we tally 20 upsets of the Duke Blue Devils since the 1985 tournament, including 14 that were against opponents more than one seeding away from them. That’s easily the most total upsets over that period.
