Nowadays, any coach outside the ACC who schedules a road game against the Duke basketball program is essentially scheduling a loss.
Right now, a liar would be anyone under the age of 19 who claims to have been inside Cameron Indoor Stadium to witness a Duke basketball loss to a non-conference foe. To the same point, a dead man would be pretty much any man who had already outlived the average human life expectancy at the time of the last such occurrence: an 83-82 loss to St. John’s on Feb. 26, 2000.
The win streak stands at 150. Not only do the Blue Devils continue to add to the all-time NCAA record for such a streak — three such wins so far this season — but they currently all but triple the next longest active mark (Butler with 53).
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Prior to that St. John’s game way back when — for context, at that time, neither Harry Potter movies nor texting, for the most part, were yet things — Duke’s previous non-conference home loss was also by only one point: 63-62 to Michigan on Dec. 8, 1996.
On that day, Michigan’s now-late Robert “Tractor” Traylor silenced the Cameron Crazies with a down-the-lane game-winning thunderous dunk as time expired. At that moment, as the “Tractor” was roaring and high-kicking in celebration while running laps around soon-to-be-called Coach K Court, I was 15, in attendance with my dad, and felt empty inside.
In retrospect, though, I now feel a teensy bit special to have been one of the ever-dwindling few who can truthfully claim to have been there to see a team Mike Krzyzewski coached fall at home to a team from outside the ACC.
That said, I hope to live for many decades to come — and attend many more Duke games — without ever again having to see anything like that “Tractor” explosion in Durham that day. Fortunately, Krzyzewski’s record in now-300 non-conference home games across his 40 seasons at Duke suggests I shouldn’t have much to worry about, at least not for as long as the now-72-year-old sticks around and Cameron doesn’t fall to the ground.
But even the Blue Devils’ 292-8 clip in such games under Coach K doesn’t do justice to the power of the hexes that the modern-day patrons of Cameron somehow put on non-conference visitors. See, five of those eight losses are from Coach K’s first three seasons on the job, so before he was exclusively coaching players he had recruited.
In other words, if Duke had managed one more bucket against both St. John’s and Michigan, then teams full of Krzyzewski’s recruits would have only ever lost one non-conference home game: 75-65 to Illinois on Dec. 2, 1995, ending what was then the nation’s longest such streak at 95 wins.
And we can at least partly excuse that loss to Illinois considering Coach K had just returned from a longterm absence the previous season, which had ended with a 13-18 record (no non-conference home losses that season, likely due to the fact that the 12 games Krzyzewski did coach to start the season included all of the non-conference home games).
Now, here’s a word of advice to the hater who will surely try to claim Duke rarely plays home games against quality non-conference opponents: just sit down now before you make a total fool of yourself. Not only do the Blue Devils wind up hosting one of the top-tier teams from the Big Ten every other year as part of the ACC-Big Ten Challenge (in existence since 1999), but Krzyzewski also actively seeks out top mid-major opponents.
For context — and admittedly as a cheap shot — more times than not the mid-majors Coach K invites to Cameron are a notch up from Evansville, who last week embarrassed then-No. 1 Kentucky inside the evidently not-so-intimidating Rupp Arena, paving the way for Duke’s No. 1 ranking this week.
Look, Duke’s overall record inside Cameron Indoor Stadium speaks for itself: 895-161, a win rate of 85 percent, and 537-66 under Coach K, a win rate of 89 percent.
But Krzyzewski’s non-conference record inside the 9,314-seat little slice of heaven speaks to some kind of mystical powers.
As a closing example and another chance for a cheap shot at those Kentucky fans responsible for a large chunk of the venom that the Duke basketball program endures, following the only time Kentucky ever dared to challenge the non-conference voodoo of Cameron Indoor Stadium with Coach K present (Nov. 19, 1988), the Wildcats had to limp back home — like so many non-ACC opponents before then, ever since, and hopefully for years to come — with a 25-point loss in tow.
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