The photo was taken in a back hallway of the Smith Center, out of public view, two generations of coaches standing together. Who could have imagined, when Mike Krzyzewski and Roy Williams and Hubert Davis and Jon Scheyer all posed before the first Duke-Carolina game in February, that it could have been recreated this week in New Orleans?
That was the extent of North Carolina’s honoring of the imminently retiring Krzyzewski, which was … fine, considering the Tar Heels had acknowledged his 1,000th win a few years earlier and been criticized by their own fans for it. It also took a longer view of the two transitions, recognizing that what’s happening with the two programs is not about one person, but the shared passage from two Hall of Fame legends to two inexperienced alumni groomed to take over.
Saturday’s Final Four game is only going to further drive that point home. Davis’ work as a first-year head coach is only going to heighten the pressure on Scheyer next year, just as Scheyer’s recruiting prowess during his season as coach-in-waiting has done the same to Davis. But this game is an inflection point in even bigger ways.
There’s a changing of the guard, to be sure, but also a changing of the tides.
Whatever happens, whoever wins, this is the unquestioned and absolute end of an era in this rivalry, the last game between UNC and Duke as we know them now, and the gateway to a new one.
And not just because of the fallout from the result of this game — the final and ultimate confrontation between good and evil, depending on your perspective — which will linger for a long, long time, a nuclear basketball winter for the loser given that the winner will play for a title. Regardless of who wins, it’s already clear the tone of this rivalry is going to be different going forward.
Two coaches with everything to prove are replacing two coaches with almost nothing left to prove. It’s almost certainly going to get less collegial. More combative. And not just in handshake lines. If Duke grumbled about the way Krzyzewski was or wasn’t treated in Chapel Hill — and not the pearl-clutching over the students’ profane chant — North Carolina has certainly raised an eyebrow at the length and breadth of Krzyzewski’s prolonged farewell, especially given Williams’ sudden and immediate transition from coach to fan.
The truth is, this rivalry has gotten a little too cuddly for comfort in recent years. Krzyzewski and Williams saw each other as peers as much as rivals, among the very few people on earth who could understand what the other was going through, both high up the ladder of Nike-sponsored coaches.
At ACC meetings, they and Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim were a powerful voting bloc that ran the discussions and, effectively, made the decisions. “Thick as thieves,” Notre Dame’s Mike Brey said of Krzyzewski and Boeheim, and Williams was often right there with them on matters of importance.
The heat that once burned furiously between Krzyzewski the upstart and Dean Smith the patriarch faded and cooled as Krzyzewski assumed the latter role and befriended Smith. And the players have always often been close, before and during their college careers: Joel Berry and Grayson Allen, who had every right to be mortal enemies, were friends and AAU teammates; many consider both schools in the recruiting process; there’s more social overlap than one might expect.
There hasn’t really been a flashpoint since Allen tripped Garrison Brooks during the 2018 ACC tournament, and even that paled in comparison to Gerald Henderson elbowing Tyler Hansbrough in the nose, let alone Art Heyman and Larry Brown slugging it out. No one’s asking for actual blood to be spilled, to be sure, but a little bad blood would inject some frisson back into the proceedings.
That’s what we got in Cameron on March 5. Whether Chris Carrawell thought Davis had been standoffish to the Duke assistants in the past or there were truly hurt feelings over an insufficient tribute in Chapel Hill, his refusal to shake Davis’ hand was an incandescent flare that things were going to be different between the two staffs now than they had been for their predecessors.
And while it seems doubtful Carrawell would have been as petulant if Duke had won, the incident — combined with the embarrassment of the collected decades of Duke players behind the bench as UNC ruined their night — signaled that the future might be very different than the present, even before fate sent both teams swinging back around to collide again in New Orleans.
Saturday’s game is both the end of something and the beginning of something else. What this rivalry has been lately is not what it is about to imminently become.
