Whoopty-Duke: Partial Refs Taint Glorious Run

Last night, the Duke Blue Devils learned just what it feels like to win it all. In a somewhat dull championship game, Duke was in control virtually the entire second half.

A national championship is rare enough. But Duke's win capped an even more impressive four-year stretch of consecutive ACC titles and #1 seeds. Championships are won every year. Domination on that level, year after year occurs once every John Wooden.

Oddly enough, Duke players and their fans learned what it's like to be that good, that long, well before the game even ended.

That lesson occurred after a questionable foul call on Arizona late in the first half. That's when the supposedly neutral Minneapolis crowd spontaneously burst into a chorus of boos. The fans were railing against far more than just that one call. They finally began to express their resentment at a perception that referees have been unfairly favoring Duke all year, particularly in last Saturday's game against Maryland.

Justified in their actions or not, these spectators tought Duke loyalists a lesson which might last well beyond this memorable season.

In the words of Wilt Chamberlain, nobody roots for Goliath.

Especially when Goliath wins.

The most successful teams are often the most hated as well. It happens most often in the pros--see the Yankees--but occassionally appears in the college ranks as well. Notre Dame has been despised for years for its seemingly neverending football success. For years, Duke fans have been the ringleaders of the most popular fan club in college hoops ABCers: Anybody But Carolina.

This year, it seems to have changed to ABD.

Duke easily deserved to win the tournament this year. Their almost routine performance last night left little doubt that it were the best team in the coutnry.

But to the thousands in the Metrodome who booed last night, there was also little doubt that Duke got all the calls.

To be sure, the Blue Devils probably didn't need them. Jason Williams and Shane Battier are likely the two best players in the nation. When a third player--in this case, Mike Dunleavy--steps up, Duke is virtually unbeatale.

But just becuase the Duke players can win despite help from the officials does not mean that the zebras don't favor them.

Consider that Duke, a team that regularly hoists thirty threes a game, got to the foul line hundreds of times more than its opponets this year. This is without any semblance of an inside game--save for Carlos Boozer, who was inconsistent for much of the year.

It's not like there's some elaborate conspiracy going on. But officials are human, and superb, hard-working, talented teams like Duke tend to get the benefit of the doubt, just as superb teams do in the NBA. Michael Jordan traveled half the time--that doesn't make him any less of a player.

Anyone who doesn't think the referees have given Duke the benefit of the doubt this year should remember the words of coach Mike Krzyzewski himself. In 1984, when Duke first began to show signs of future greatness, Krzyzewski publicly railed on ACC officiating, provlaiming to all that there was a double standard in the conference--and North Carolina was the sole beneficiary.

Fact is, the coach was right. Carolina, consistently among the greatest programs in college basketball, did get the benefit of the doubt back then, much to the chagrin of ABCers across the country. Krzyzewski's famous outcry won him a degree of national respect and, more than anything, established Duke as that intended to nto just compete with the North Carolina of the basketball, but to beat them.

Now it's Duke's turn to dominate. And like most dominant teams, it's time for the fans who don't love the Devils to hate them.

Krzyzewski is a brilliant coach. Expect him to field championship cailber teams for years to come. Expect Dick Vitale to predict Duke to win it all every year.

But in the future, he might not have a media darling like Shane Battier--one national writer called him the most-adored college player since Bill Bradley--to deflect away all possible negative attention.

In the future, "neutral" fans might not wait until the final game of the season to boo lustily at the referees while wondering why all the calls seem to go Duke's way.

And in the future, some hotshot young coach from a developing program might talk about a double standard in officiating that exists with Duke.

And like Coach K almost two decades before, he will be exactly right.