Duke basketball: Roy Williams again plays copycat to Coach K

What is an appropriate name for someone who seems to imitate the same Duke basketball recruiting methods he publicly condemns?

North Carolina coach Roy Williams has every right to sneak a peek at Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski’s answers to the annual recruiting test.

Such an act is not punishable.

Of course, even if a rule was in place, the NCAA would surely claim — in UNC’s case, anyway — that since non-coaches on the Chapel Hill campus have copied off peers’ exams in the past, the issue is not exclusive to the athletic department and is therefore not a violation.

Punishable or not, though, Duke fans have every right to investigate.

Let’s start back in January:

"“UNC is starting to talk to me more since I got the Duke offer,” five-star 2020 center Walker Kessler told Rivals."

So at least one teenager has called out the suspect timing (by the end of January, to no surprise, Kessler had landed a UNC offer).

Another five-star, Paolo Banchero, may have questioned a similar “coincidence” on Monday: two days after Krzyzewski extended an offer to the 2021 power forward, Williams followed suit.

And yet another recruit, D.J. Steward, apparently wouldn’t be surprised to have the same thing happen to him. The four-star 2020 combo guard also picked up a Duke offer on Saturday; also over the weekend, Steward spoke to Stock Risers’ Jake Weingarten about the suddenly ramped-up interest from both UNC and Kentucky.

"“[Tar Heel and Wildcat assistants] are both recruiting me very hard and will get me on the phone with the head coaches sometime this week,” he said."

Sure, there have been times when Ol’ Roy has beaten Coach K to the punch with an offer.

But the point of this article is to further expose a truth that fans from both sides deserve to know, even if only one side is mature enough to listen: no matter what narrative Tar Heels want us to believe, the two programs pursue roughly the same future one-and-done players.

What happens is Krzyzewski’s superior family-oriented approach to recruiting — with #TheBrotherhood as its increasingly trending symbol — allows the Blue Devils to outshine their competitors (ever since Williams arrived at UNC in 2003, Duke leads the one-and-done count, 18-5).

ALSO READ: Blue Devils bag recruits with bags of family promises

Williams, of course, prefers to explain away his failures as just a strategic difference:

"“The little difference is if I had one or two [one-and-dones in the same class], I wouldn’t want three or four more,” the now-68-year-old said last year, according to Adam Zagoria, in an obvious cheap shot at his nemesis — aka, the all-time winningest coach he’ll never surpass. “I’d love to have one or two of those guys, but I like some other guys that I get to enjoy and get to know even better and are not there only eight or nine months or something like that.“It’s a smaller philosophy difference.”"

Really? So then why did the UNC staff extend offers to five 2018 five-stars who ended up playing only one college season: Zion Williamson, Coby White, Nassir Little, Simisola Shittu, and Romeo Langford? And what about the eight or so offers they handed out to projected one-and-done five-stars from the 2019 class — three of whom chose to become Duke basketball players? Or the seven or so Tar Heel offers already on the table to projected one-and-done 2020 recruits — one of whom has already picked Duke?

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What Williams’ statement from that March day in 2018 actually sounds like is sour grapes coming less than two months after having to watch Zion — whom UNC all but stalked in the months leading up to his announcement — shocking the nation by proclaiming, “I will be joining The Brotherhood of Duke University.”

But nobody can blame a dude for trying to cover up his imitation of the foe his fans call “ratface” — the same “ratface” who announced his impending rule over the rivalry 30 years ago with an unforgettable, profane exclamation during one of the most heated games in the history of the rivalry.

And Coach K has since delivered.

See, not only have the Blue Devils bested the Tar Heels in every key metric this decade, but they have also done so across the time since Krzyzewski declared the start of his reign.

The symbol of his declaration was the glorious F-bomb he flung at now-late UNC legend Dean Smith during the 1989 ACC Tournament title game.

The Duke basketball program may have lost the battle that day, making this then-7-year-old fan sob uncontrollably, but a longterm hindsight perspective shows — even though nobody knew it at the time — the Dukies’ tears after Danny Ferry’s full-court heave rimmed out were actually tears of the joy that would lie ahead.

First, since 2010 — essentially the time period UNC fans want the world to believe Duke has failed by not living up to the expectations that come from a slew of No. 1 recruiting classes or, as they call it, “preseason national championships” — Duke holds a 2-1 lead over UNC in actual national championships, a 4-1 lead in ACC Tournament titles, a 15-9 lead in the head-to-head series, and a 299-277 lead in total wins.
And since the season after Coach K basically forewarned Smith his time at the top of the list of ACC coaching legends was quickly coming to an end, Duke holds a 5-4 lead over UNC in national championships, a 13-7 lead in ACC Tournament titles, a 39-32 lead in the head-to-head series, and an eye-opening 861-798 lead in total wins.

ALSO READ: Duke mocks critics by again finishing as decade’s best

Granted, while Tar Heels are likely to ignore the facts, most would spew the excuse that the cloud of an NCAA “investigation” into the illegitimate classes dinged the program’s recent recruiting efforts and overall wins.

By taking off the light-blue glasses, though, they would see that’s not so much as an excuse as it is an admission of a massive scar to the program’s reputation, aka, an epic embarrassment — one Duke fans like this writer have absolutely no intention to ever let be forgotten.

After all, the families of kids like Kessler, Banchero, and Steward deserve to have all the facts about the program overseen by that dadgum fella who seems to keep popping up just after the GOAT has left.

Stay tuned to Ball Durham for more Duke basketball recruiting updates, analyses, opinions, and predictions.