When Duke And Kansas Play, The Stakes Are Usually High

Barry looks at high-stake battles between the Blue Devils and the Jayhawks

Quite the pre-conference schedule for Kansas.

On November 8 KU hosted and beat North Carolina. And this week KU meets Duke in a TV-generated showdown at Las Vegas. (Get your bets down while you can!)

With 15 NCAA men’s championships between them — 6 for the Tar Heels, 5 for the Blue Devils, 4 for the Jayhawks – the trio in blue are fixtures in modern basketball’s elite, making them recruiting magnets, perennial targets for competitors, and sound TV investments.

Befitting high-performance programs, five of the 14 Duke-Kansas meetings — better than one in three — occurred during an NCAA tournament.

Of those five NCAA games, three took place in the Final Four, with Duke winning in 1991 for the first of the school’s five championships, all under Mike Krzyzewski. Two other clashes came with titles on the line, in 1985-86 in the Preseason NIT at Madison Square Garden and 2012-13 in the Maui Invitational. The Blue Devils won both. Overall, since 1985 DU leads KU 8-6, 6-2 in championship competition.

The teams actually met twice in ’86, Krzyzewski’s breakout Duke season, with each winning once.

Wing David Henderson, easily the least celebrated starter of a 37-3 team remembered for Johnny Dawkins, Mark Alarie, Jay Bilas and Tommy Amaker, was named the NIT MVP at Madison Square Garden. In March the Devils topped the Jayhawks in the national semifinals at Dallas, only to run out of gas against Louisville and freshman center Purvis Ellison in the final.

What arose from that bitter end was a sweet Duke run exceeded in modern times only by John Wooden’s UCLA Bruins several decades earlier: seven Final Fours in nine years.

A second Final Four meeting with Kansas, an oncourt clash of Dannys, came quickly, in the 1988 semifinals. KU’s Danny Manning was named the Most Outstanding Player as Larry Brown’s club went on to defeat Oklahoma for the title. Meanwhile, leading perhaps Duke’s least impressive Final Four squad, Danny Ferry demonstrated his all-around excellence on a national stage. The following season Ferry was the ACC’s repeat POY and a consensus national player of the year.

The last and most recent Duke-KU Final Four game occurred in 1991.

The Devils had been skewered by Nevada-Las Vegas in the ’90 final, losing by 30, still the greatest margin of defeat in a national championship game. UNLV was an undefeated colossus when it met second-seed Duke in the ’91 semis. The basketball cognoscenti buried and belittled Krzyzewski’s squad of earnest strivers, raising issues of class and race as well.

The Devils won notwithstanding, behind Bobby Hurley, Christian Laettner, Brian Davis and Grant Hill. Then they regrouped and, resisting a mesmerizing sense of accomplishment in beating Jerry Tarkanian’s Runnin’ Rebels, took care of Kansas. That was the last time the programs met in a Final Four.

There’s a hint of irony, then, in having this year’s KU-DU contest held in Vegas. And there’s a touch of affirmation found in this month’s meetings of heavyweights, reminding decisionmakers at Chapel Hill and Durham why we so value an in-league rivalry like Duke and Carolina, a familiar anchor of excellence even as other traditions and alliances fall apart.