In 1980, Duke University graduate students could purchase basketball season tickets for $25.  The seats in Cameron Indoor Stadium were reserved and required only one overnight wait before the season to make the purchase.  I sat in section ten and up pretty high.

It was from that vantage point that I watched Mike Krzyzewski’s 74^th career win – his first for the Blue Devils – as Duke beat Stetson 67-49 on November 30, 1980 behind Tom Emma’s 19 points. I saw every home game of his first season from up there.

Coach K had been a surprise hire the previous March when Bill Foster left for South Carolina and another rebuilding project at the end of the 1979-80 season. Foster had brought the Duke program back to prominence with a championship game appearance in 1978, a #1 ranking in 1978-79 and an Elite Eight team in 1980.

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Ten days have passed since Ohio St. destroyed Duke.  I still have a hard time believing how thoroughly the Buckeyes thrashed the Blue Devils.  Every Duke fan went through the same roller coaster of emotions throughout the game. Have a chart!

A chart on disbelief

This was a slaughter.  There were two brights spots: Austin Rivers and Mason Plumlee. Austin Rivers made some Dwayne Wade-esque plays and also showed an improvement in ball distribution. Mason Plumlee got shit on by the referees but still played fantastically.  The box score might not show it but he played great defense on Sullinger by forcing him into a number of ugly shots.  Sullinger channeled his inner Tyler Hansbrough as all his shot-put attempts went in.  But other than Rivers and Mason, Duke didn’t have too much to be happy about.

Where does Duke go from here? Duke fans will surely remember January 30, 2010 when Duke was demolished by Georgetown in front of *gasp* President Obama! As we all know, the Devils went on to capture the championship later that year. Does this current team have the ability to rebound from such a loss and make a run at the title? From an optimistic point of view, Duke does have a chance.  There are a few things Duke needs to do to make this happen:

• Give Mason Plumlee the ball, a lot. He has proven he can be extremely effective in the paint. He no longer dribbles the ball off his knees. He has avoided shooting horrible mid-range airballs. More touches will make him more confident and more confidence will translate into better play.
• Throw Josh Hairston into the mix. Some people have compared Hairston to Lance Thomas but I don’t see it. Hairston doesn’t have athleticism of Lance Thomas. Now contemplate that sentence. You’re asking yourself why someone less athletic than Lance Thomas should play. It’s because Hairston is a scrappy motherfucker. He doesn’t back down from anyone. During the offseason Hairston and Kevin Durant teamed up to take on youth basketball leagues in the midwest. Durant was the scorer and Hairston was the enforcer. Black eyes among 12 year old basketball players rose 653% when Durant and Hairston played. Give Hairston 15 minutes a game and see how he can frustrate the opposing team.
• Try Austin Rivers at point guard. He displayed passing abilities in the OSU game that we haven’t seen before. Furthermore he has a fantastic handle and he’s lightning quick. The possible downside is his proclivity to make bad decisions after driving into the lane. However, as he gets more experience he will learn whether to take the shot or kick the ball out during his penetrations. Moving Seth Curry to the shooting guard position will help Duke spread the floor as defenders will have to stay close to both him and Andre Dawkins on the perimeter.

Coming into Tuesday night’s game against Ohio State, Duke fans had a few reasons to be concerned. The team had just finished a particularly exhausting series of five games in nine days, and it was the team’s first game on the road against a very good and very experienced team that had to date swallowed every team in its path. Personally, I found the spectre of facing the ghost of Greg Paulus to be the most frightening thing about facing OSU. After he was shown wearing what looked like his father’s Thursday suit, I had to work quite hard to fight off the nausea.

It looked so wrong to see him on a basketball court again, especially since I thought I had seen the last of him inspiring terrible Duke performances. Would his mere presence mean the team was bound to underwhelm? Would Seth Curry start backing into his defenders after crossing half court? Would we see Austin Rivers throwing himself into Lebron James’ lap in futile pursuit of an errant football style pass from Andre Dawkins? Would we see Jared Sullinger soar from the free-throw line and throw down a sick jam, obstructed only by a pathetically flopping Tyler Thornton? I was mentally preparing myself for a particularly Paulusian performance on all accounts – what I thought to be the worst case scenario.

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We all like to think that we carefully gather and evaluate facts and data before coming to our conclusions.  But we don’t.

Instead, we tend to suffer from confirmation bias and thus reach a conclusion first.  Only thereafter do we gather facts, but even so it’s only to support our pre-conceived conclusions.  We then take our selected “facts” and cram them into our desired narratives, because narratives are crucial to how we make sense of reality.  They help us to explain, understand and interpret the world around us.  They also give us a frame of reference we can use to remember the concepts we take them to represent.  Perhaps most significantly, we inherently prefer narrative to data — often to the detriment of our understanding.  Keeping one’s analysis and interpretation of the facts reasonably objective – since analysis and interpretation are required for data to be actionable – is really, really hard even in the best of circumstances.

That introduction is a helpful predicate to a perfectly obvious conclusion: fans are inherently irrational.  If we are exceedingly prone to various mental biases in life generally, when we’re in fan mode we can readily go off the rails entirely.  And when we’re in fan/rivalry mode, almost anything is possible.

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