Duke basketball: Time to stop debating who would win NCAA Tournament

Projecting how far the Duke basketball team would have advanced this month or who would have ended the season under falling confetti is as pointless as an unsharpened new pencil.

Any longtime Duke basketball follower knows that no amount of success in the regular season can guarantee a glorious ending to the NCAA Tournament. Just take a trip back in time to 1999 or ask Trajan Langdon, Elton Brand, Corey Maggette, William Avery, Chris Carrawell, Nate James, and Shane Battier to tell you what type of banner a 32-game win streak doesn’t always buy.

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But as I feared, despite no lines to even fill in, fans, media, and apparently even coaches on Monday remained gung-ho about debating which school would have landed on the final line had coronavirus concerns not shut down the entire Big Dance.

So this article is a necessary follow-up to the one I wrote on Sunday explaining why the NCAA made the right choice in not announcing a March Madness bracket at all.

ALSO READ: Thank goodness for NCAA decision on brackets

Hey, I’m all for anyone here on the Ball Durham team trying to predict future Duke basketball happenings (read: “Probabilities for each Blue Devil’s return next season“). Heck, sometimes we even come close to getting it right (read: “Nostradamus Dukie all but foretold regular season“).

And I’m definitely always game for speculation about the meaning of any Dukie’s cryptic posts on social media (read: “Duke freshman hints at returning for his sophomore season“).

What I can’t fathom, though, is the fascination with obsessing over what the outcome would have been for an event that will never happen. It just seems like a giant waste of time, even when free time is what most of us have an ample supply of during this time.

In other words, even though I’ve made my share of miscalls, it seems I’m only attracted to those forecasts that we could all go back and grade later on based on what actually happened.

Nevertheless, some writer was bound to fully fire up the nonsensical woulda-been-champs discussion; of course, to be fair, I must admit it is suddenly a tad difficult coming up with ideas for sports stories in a sports-less world — not to mention that it’s probably a giant waste of my time advising others how to spend their time.

Now, it’s not that I’m mad at 247Sports insider Evan Daniels for asking more than 115 Division I coaches which group would have cut down April nets. No, it’s just that I’m simply uninterested in the findings.

Though some of you will surely claim my Dukie bias is the culprit for my apathy toward such results, I assure you I wouldn’t give a hoot even if the “coaches’ champs” were the Blue Devils — who, no matter what the ludicrous debates conclude, will forever go down as 25-6 overall, 15-5 in ACC play, and nothing more or less.

ALSO READ: Duke’s five most heartwarming Dean Dome wins

That said, I know most of you still have some inherent desire to find out “who won it all” and how many votes the Blue Devils received, so have at it (in an attempt to come to terms with reality, this Duke basketball enthusiast lacks the desire to scroll all the way through it to find out for you).

For more information about COVID-19, visit the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s website or the website for your state’s Department of Health.

Stay tuned to Ball Durham for more updates, analyses, and opinions regarding all things Duke basketball: past, present, future, and in the NBA.