March Madness is around the corner with the final week of the regular season before us. Teams battling for a spot in the NCAA tournament are seeking wins in the most desperate way possible. With Bubbles set to burst this week and into conference tournaments next week, the focus has been who will be the number one seeds in the NCAA Tournament. Interestingly enough, that talk has also excluded the current number four team in the country – Duke Blue Devils.
Duke, who sits at 25-4 on the season, has two of the biggest wins of the season versus the current number one team in the country Gonzaga and number seven team Kentucky. They are also 5-1 against quad-one team, 6-2 against quad-two teams, 6-1 against quad-three teams and 8-0 against quad four teams.
The criticism of the Blue Devils has been how weak the ACC is this year, with not a single team outside of Duke ranked in the Associated Press Top-25 rankings, but Duke’s strength of schedule and strength of record ranks higher than Gonzaga, and the Blue Devils own the head to head matchup.
What’s interesting is that the so-called college basketball experts have Gonzaga as the presumed number-one overall seed due to dominating a historically bad conference – year in and year out. These are the same “experts” who kept Gonzaga as the number one team in the nation after losing by double digits this past weekend (Duke was the only team in the top nine not to lose). The only argument to support Gonzaga has been their dominance of the West Coast Conference. The same argument shows clear hypocrisy. How can you praise Gonzaga for dominating a terrible WCC, but use the Blue Devils’ dominating a “weak” ACC as a reason to rank them on the two-seed line? Duke won the head to head matchup and has better credentials, so you tell me who’s the stronger number one seed.