Super Bowl, Super Tuesday, and a Super Rivalry all in the span of four days.

MITCHELL BLATT

This has been my sports/TV schedule for the past few days:
Sunday: Super Bowl (Pats losing raised my spirits.)
Monday: Utter boredom and anger that football is over.
Tuesday: I’m a political junkie, so I watched Super Tuesday returns till midnight, also flipping between the Cavs win over the Celtics.
Tonight: Dickie V returns for Duke-UNC.

Dickie V might not be 100% after his throat surgery. He admitted that he won’t be as energetic as he usually is:

“It’s not like I’m going to come out there and say, “Hey, he’s awesome, baby!’ and all that,” he said, launching into his familiar shtick anyway. “I’ve got to be smart about it.” (Full Story)

But the teams certainly will be great. Duke and North Carolina rest atop the ACC and national rankings. Duke is ahead, #2 in the AP and undefeated in conference play, but UNC only has one loss and is #3 in the nation.

North Carolina will be without guard Ty Lawson, who is averaging 13.6 points per game, but you can be sure it will still be an explosive, highly competitive, shot-for-shot (not referring to shots at the basket) matchup. If you watched any of Duke’s past few matchups or seen the videos on the internet, you might have confused it with a UFC fight. Here’s some video from Duke-VT, courtesy of Awful Announcing, courtesy of ESPN:

Everyone wants to take down Duke, and no one more so that North Carolina, and of course Duke wants to take them down. Not only have Duke’s games been aggressive and physical, they have also been close, at least for the first halves. Duke was up by four on Virginia Tech before beating them by 17. They were down to Maryland by 9 before winning by 9. NC State also had them at the half by 9 before losing by 20. Duke did lead Miami by 7 at the half in their most recent game.

If they start the game like that against UNC, they won’t have as easy of a time coming back. Even without Lawson, the Heels are much better than any of the other teams that Duke took a while to warm up to. It will be interesting to see whether Duke was simply playing to their competition or if they have a genuine problem starting out games.

I don’t know which it’s going to be, but I do know that it’s gonna be awesome.

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