It’s Duke week. In fact, with last night’s game thankfully behind us, the countdown to Saturday’s UNC-Duke game has officially begun. We’re all working ourselves up in anticipation of the biggest rivalry in American sports and we’ll have plenty of coverage leading up to that big night.
Of course, on another corner of the Triangle, the UNC women’s basketball team just scored a huge rivalry win of their own, against N.C. State in Raleigh, for their first Quad 1 win of the season and their first win in Raleigh since
2019. That game had a bit of a prelude, too, including coach Courtney Banghart suggesting that both she and Wolfpack coach Wes Moore “both have an appetite” to get back to Carolina and State playing twice a year after that tradition stopped with the addition of more teams into the ACC. Banghart has fed into that rivalry during her time in Chapel Hill, most famously with her comments a few years ago about Reynolds Coliseum being a “small gym.”
The same isn’t really true between UNC and Duke on the women’s side. It’s still a rivalry, to be clear, enough of one that the league deemed that UNC/Duke would be each program’s single home-and-home each year. Banghart and Kara Lawson have had some memorable matchups the past few years, most of them featuring stifling defenses that force aesthetically displeasing basketball. But for some reasons I can guess at and others I can’t, the same kind of buzz doesn’t really surround the lead-up to those games, let alone anything approaching the anticipation of UNC-Duke on the men’s side.
Longtime readers might remember that back in 2020, Brandon and I each wrote an article representing a side of the at least slightly tongue-in-cheek question, “Is N.C. State our rival?” Brandon took the “no” angle, and I defended the “yes” side. Those articles were about men’s basketball specifically, but in mine, I also wrote about the context of Duke-UNC, all the narratives and perspectives that get distilled into two or three basketball games a year: in short, public, affordable, and parochial UNC against private, elite, placeless Duke. Each of these matchups is a moral judgement. UNC fans get to crow about democratizing education and representing the Old North State when their team wins, and Duke fans get to preen about their school having more Nobel Prizes or whatever when they get the result. No, I’m not going to pretend to be objective.
All that is to say that even though the Duke-UNC rivalry and comparison is bigger than basketball, I never really feel that magnitude extending to other sports. In women’s basketball, football, baseball, volleyball, lacrosse, softball, soccer, and all the rest, Duke-UNC isn’t not a big deal, but it’s not so big that there can’t be bigger deals. Meanwhile, it feels to me like everything I said in that same article about what the UNC-State rivalry represents — education for work versus education for personal betterment, blue-collar versus white-collar, rural Americana against American metropolis — is present in some way in a lot more sports than men’s basketball. Banghart all but calling Reynolds a barn, Dave Doeren calling out UNC football for not knowing anything about “culture,” even the difference between UNC’s Rameses referring to mythology and State’s Mr and Ms Wuf having names as straightforward as you can get… these things feel not just like a meeting ground for those conflicts, but like manifestations of them.
And so I ask for today’s Tar Heel Blog Question of the Day: with men’s basketball out of the question, is it ever possible for a UNC-State game, or even the rivalry as a whole, to be bigger than the same sport’s UNC-Duke game? Or is UNC-Duke, as the battle between academic heavyweights in the arena of college athletics, still the superior rivalry by default? Honestly, my memories from my time on campus are of always caring more about beating Duke, but I’ve kind of convinced myself into at least believing in the possibility of caring more about a State game or series in, say, baseball. Maybe that’s the difference between being a student and caring most about the school stuff, and being an adult and caring about the world stuff. I’d love to know what y’all think.
