Originally Posted by
throatybeard
I was giving this some shower thought. It has no predictive power, but off the top of my head...
What we're hoping to materialize is a situation where despite losing the home game first, Duke wins in Chapel Hill second at the end of the RS. I thought, that has to be rare. IIRC, the current UNC-odds/Duke-evens calendar for the last home game goes back through 1986. For some reason, it went Duke-UNC, Duke-UNC in both 1984 and 1985, which put us on the evens, where we've been since.
So, ignoring the ACCT,
Duke wins first game at home, but then loses on road:
1993, 1997, 2003, 2005, 2011, 2017
Duke loses first game at home, then gets RS-swept:
1987, 1995, 2007, 2009, 2019
Duke wins first game at home, then RS-sweeps:
1991, 1999, 2013, 2015
Duke loses first game, but recovers to win second:
1989, 2001
So it's two of the possible seventeen cases so far. If you wanted to throw 1984 and 1982 into Carolina's RS-sweep pile, then you'd have the complete set under Krzyzewski. Two of nineteen.
(Obviously, the ACCT complicates and/or intensifies the general feel of things in 1989, 1991, 1999, 2001, 2011, 2017 and 2019).
So it's only happened twice in the K era, Ferry's senior year, and the Battier-cheetah game, and both of those teams won at least their NCAAT regional. What I can't remember is why we got our butts just plain kicked in Durham on 1989, and then somehow pulled it out in Chapel Hill a few weeks later. The only one of those three games I remember mildly well other than the W or L is the ACC Final where Ferry caught iron from three-quarters court, which would have prolonged the game if it fell.