Football, you did good.
It looks like you'll top out at four wins, which doubles your total from the previous three seasons. Duke students really couldn't have hoped for more, even as you lined up for that game-winner in Winston-Salem. If nothing else, David Cutcliffe's first season re-energized the campus and revealed to students-if only a little-why at many college campus in the South, those six or seven football Saturdays are the best days of the year.
But Duke isn't one of those schools, and it might not ever be.
It's hard to ignore the weekend's athletic juxtaposition: One day after the Blue Devils' last-gasp bowl hopes were essentially suffocated in Death Valley, it took all 40 minutes for Duke to escape Rhode Island on the hardwood.
As Mike Krzyzewski said afterward, the game was a bit of an eye-opener: "Welcome to the season."
Emphasis on "the."
This is the real season at Duke. Sorry, football, but right now, you're more of a fling than anything else-something to distract students while they count down the days until basketball's triumphant return.
That return came a bit quicker than anyone thought Sunday, with Rhode Island providing a test instead of the expected early-season diagnostic quiz.
Despite the surprising difficulty of the material, the Blue Devils passed Sunday's test. They didn't get an A, but they passed.
It's hard to get excited by blowout wins over Presbyterian and Georgia Southern where the suspense isn't tied to the result but rather revolves around which freshman will throw down the best dunk (Elliot Williams took the prize this season). You can't extract anything meaningful from these contests, because regardless of how Duke plays, it will win, and likely by a lot.
But you can learn a lot from tests like Sunday's, especially when you don't pass with flying colors. Lost in the effusive praise and J.J. Redick comparisons deservedly bestowed on Jimmy Baron's second-half pièce de résistance is the fact that the Blue Devils were outplayed before Baron turned into Jimmy Chitwood (we can only imagine how good Chitwood would have been with a 3-point line).
Although Baron had just three points at intermission, Rhode Island led by as many as 12 late in the half. Duke allowed the Rams plenty of open looks and second chances-things that won't fly against teams that regularly shoot lights-out and are bigger on the interior than the Blue Devils. The Rams, despite Sunday's evidence to the contrary, possess neither of those qualities.
More immediately distressing was Duke's inability to score in the halfcourt. During the Blue Devils' 4-for-19 start from the field, they weren't exactly missing open looks. They were missing contested jumpers and layups taken off of 1-on-1 play. Duke's saving grace on offense was the free-throw line, where it shot 88 percent and scored more than one-third of its points.
The ultimate trait tested Sunday, however, was the Blue Devils' resolve, and luckily for them, it was the one area they aced. Krzyzewski admitted his team was caught a bit off-guard by Rhode Island's energy in the first half-something that shouldn't happen again-but Duke responded in the clichéd moments "when it mattered most."
It's not how you start halves; it's how you finish them. An 11-0 run to close the first 20 minutes got the Blue Devils back into the game, and the Singler and Scheyer Show down the stretch got them the win.
This was a team that faded down last year's stretch and didn't have a go-to scorer for the season's biggest possessions (one fairly notable exception being a certain coast-to-coast layup against a certain 15-seed in a certain NCAA Tournament).
Late Sunday, with Gerald Henderson never getting into a rhythm, Krzyzewski had no problems giving the ball to his early-season star, Singler. Down one with 20 seconds left, the Blue Devils didn't try anything tricky-not even a ballscreen. It was an isolation for Singler, and the sophomore got himself to the line and sank two free throws for the second straight possession.
Singler got the call on the defensive end to stop Baron, and that's when he halted the "Hoosiers" analogies.
It was the first test of many, and there's obvious room for improvement. But Duke showed promise-the kind of promise fans had grown accustomed to the Blue Devils fulfilling in the past.
Welcome to the season.
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