I think Brevity's point was that almost everyone has a blemish on their resume at this point.
I think the counter point to your bolded point above is that Duke now has multiple wins that are better than most other teams' best wins. @ND, vUNC, nUF (n = neutral), @UVA is a really strong core of wins. There's no denying that. I'd put those up against any team's best 4 wins.
How about Gonzaga, for example? nUF (smaller margin), nISU (currently unranked), nZona, @St Marys.
Villanova? @Purdue, @Creighton, vUVA, and then probably nNotre Dame.
Kansas? @UK, vBaylor, vWVU (in overtime), and nDuke.
Those are three of Lunardi's current #1 seeds (I didn't exclude Baylor on purpose, just thought those three were enough to get the point across). And we stack up really well in the "best wins" consideration. Where we don't stack up is simply in the loss column. And four of our five losses are in conference (3 of which were on the road), and frankly I think those will be discounted as a cost of doing business in the ACC.
Listen, I agree the NC State loss was definitely a bad one. But I don't think it's as damning as your opinion sounds. If Duke wins out, I guarantee that we'd get a 1 seed. And if Duke wins the ACC Reg Season and ACC Tourney (but drops one somewhere else), I'd also expect us to be a 1 seed. The point is not so much that NC State was an OK loss (it wasn't) as much as you can drop a game like that and still be OK seeding wise. After all, it was a conference game and a competitive one at that where we had a chance to win or tie on the last play.
Sorry, I just realized I posted all of this in the NW thread. My bad. NW is a good team! (did that shameless plug keep me on topic?)
- Chillin