NCAA's Three-Year Investigation Into Fake Classes At UNC Ends With A Whimper

By Nick Martin

After three-and-a-half years of investigating fake classes in North Carolina’s African and Afro-American Studies department that dated back over 18 years, the NCAA announced on Friday that it does not have the jurisdiction to charge the university with violations of either academic fraud or providing “impermissible benefits” to its athletes.

 

Of course, the NCAA’s findings, which can be read in full below, are strewn with catty, defensive remarks—“From its inception, the infractions case has been public in nature, including attacks on the membership’s infractions process and individual members of the panel”—and backhanded compliments to UNC’s legal team for figuring out a way to somehow make the NCAA’s investigative branch look exactly like the incompetent, over-reaching body that it is. The only violations the NCAA could bring focused on a pair of individuals, department chair Julius Nyang’oro and administrator Deborah Crowder, who refused multiple times to cooperate with the investigation. The two former UNC employees were determined to have violated the NCAA’s rule against “unethical conduct and failing to cooperate during an investigation,” resulting in Nyang’oro being hit with a five-year show cause order.

The NCAA’s Committee on Infractions, whose roster doesn’t contain a single ACC representative, split from the Enforcement Staff’s decision, ruling that North Carolina’s legal team was correct in its assertions that the courses were not designed solely for athletes and that academic fraud did not take place despite the regular occurrence of “paper classes”—per NCAA rules, only member schools, not the NCAA, are able to officially say academic fraud occurred.

(In case you’re hung up on that last bit, what it means, essentially, is that all UNC’s lawyers had to do was consistently say, “We reviewed the classes and no, we did not find academic fraud” and the NCAA’s entire case crumbled; naturally, UNC’s lawyers did just that. It was really that simple.)

UNC’s counter to the NCAA building its entire case on impermissible benefits for athletes was that because the classes were open to the entire student body, athletes, though they made up 47 percent of the total enrollment in these classes, were not granted a benefit—an easy “A” class—that was not also available to the general student population.

By leaving the ability to determine what academic fraud is to the member schools, the NCAA created an easy pathway to success for UNC. The university served its year of probation handed down by its accreditor, Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (after openly admitting to lying to SACSabout the courses multiple times); despite initially agreeing with it, the university later denied crucial findings from the Wainstein report that claimed academic fraud occurred; and it countered the academic fraud claims by asserting that while the classes did not meet the school’s rigorous standards, the little work that was required was completed and turned in, thus constituting a class. That’s it. The NCAA bylaws—bylaws cleverly written by the member schools—were all it took to nuke the NCAA’s entire investigation.

The NCAA’s case began way back in June 2014, with the first notice of allegations being released in May 2015; the second one came in April 2016, to which UNC responded that the NCAA was overstepping its bounds; the third and final NOA was issued last December. Ultimately, none of them mattered, because they never really mattered to the right people (SACS) to begin with. The NCAA, despite its loud chest-beating and insistence on adding a ram pelt next to its trojan trophy and mustang carcass, was attempting once again to lie to itself and its member schools and prosecute a university and its athletic department that, put simply, did what was best for its athletes and any struggling students. The fight against the NCAA ran up a legal bill north of $18 million for UNC. Considering a good number of folks outside and inside the program reportedly expected a “hammer to fall,” per the N&O’s Andrew Carter, I reckon a great many Tar Heels would admit that’s money well spent as soon they all wake up hungover as hell tomorrow morning.

Later tonight, UNC will host Late Night with Roy, its annual basketball pep rally, where this year, the Tar Heels will hoist the banner from its 2017 championship. I imagine, or at least hope, there will be chants of “Fuck the NCAA” as the banner, the third one UNC has won since 2005, reaches the ceiling (also known as the roof) of the Dean Dome. 

Bullpen steps up to provide Yankees with old October magic

By Mike Lupica
NY Daily News October 4, 2017
This was before the biggest night they have had at Yankee Stadium in a long time had officially begun, with the crowd coming hard and late at the Stadium along 161st St. It was maybe 20 minutes before the first pitch, and four hours before the Yankees would be back on the board in October, when somebody near Babe Ruth Plaza yelled out, “Is it Game 1 or Game 7?” And because it was a wild-card game, it felt like both.
Most of the best Yankee memories, of course, are still from across 161st St. from the new place, where the old Yankees made memories and made more history at this time of the year in baseball than any team ever has or ever will. But on this night, the 2017 Yankees made their own history.
Because across all the years for the Yankees, on either side of 161st St., the Yankees had never won a postseason game when their starting pitcher was only able to get them one out. They had done everything else in October. They had never done that. Until they did it against the Twins on Tuesday night, in a game they finally ended up winning 8-4, and winning themselves a trip to Cleveland in the process.
Luis Severino, who had pitched like such a star for the Yankees this season, lasted just one-third of an inning on Tuesday night. He lasted about 20 minutes. By the time he left, after 29 pitches, the Twins had gotten him for two home runs and there were two more runners on, at second and third. The score was 3-0, Twins. The way Severino had pitched reminded you of the time, in a Game 5 at home against the Tigers in 2011. Ivan Nova was the hot kid of that season for the Yankees. He got the ball that night with a season on the line. Gave up two home runs in the first inning. Yankees went home.
Now they were down three runs to the Twins, and Severino was gone, and here came Chad Green and his big arm out of the bullpen. This was before David Robertson would show up in the third, asked to pick up Green with the bases loaded the way Green had picked up Severino. This was a moment when the Yankees’ season was very much on the line, much too early in the Wild Card game. Maybe the Yankees would still have scored eight runs, even if they had fallen behind by five. No one knew it in the top of the first and top of October at Yankee Stadium.
So here is what Chad Green, in the biggest moment of his baseball career, did. He struck out Byron Buxton. Then he struck out the Twins’ catcher, Jason Castro. A few minutes later Didi Gregorius, one of the best trades Brian Cashman has ever made, hit a 3-run home run to tie the game. The Twins would get one more run, in the third, when Buxton got down the line fast enough to keep himself out of a double play and get the Twins the only run they would get off the Yankees’ bullpen on this night. But somehow you knew, by the time the first inning was over, that the Yankees would beat the Twins, just because they always do in October.
Robertson would go 3.1 innings on this night, and strike out five, pitch from the third and into the sixth the way Mo Rivera once pitched the late innings on occasions like this. Tommy Kahnle would come on after Robertson, and finally Aroldis Chapman in the ninth. Over the last 8.2 innings of this game, the one when so much excitement and so much promise for this Yankee team could have gone to waste, Green and Robertson and Kahnle and Chapman made their own history on the north side of 161st.
It all started with Green, who not only struck out the last two guys of the top of the first but the first two guys in the top of the second. It really did feel like the earliest in a postseason ballgame a save had ever been recorded for the New York Yankees.
I asked Jeff Nelson, once a great Yankee reliever himself, on championship Yankee teams, what it was like to come in the way Green did and know he had to get a strikeout.
“Sometimes you try to hard and end up getting yourself into a bad count,” Nelson said. “And sometimes you get strikeouts like he got tonight."
He got his strikeouts and Robertson got his and the Yankees backed all this with three home runs: From Gregorius, from Brett Gardner, and from Aaron Judge, who hit one out to left that seemed to get there faster than a text message. All season long, we had seen the kind of stick the Yankees have. We had seen a good bullpen get better at the trade deadline because Cashman got Robertson and Kahnle from the White Sox. Now they had played their way to Cleveland with home runs, and with that bullpen.
The Yankees hadn’t won a playoff game in five years. Hadn’t ever won a postseason game in which their starter only lasted a third of an inning. They won Tuesday night, after it looked like they might lose early. They go to Cleveland. Back on the board in October.

Gene Michael was much more than man who saved the Yankees

by Joel Sherman                                                                           September 7, 2017

The Yankees would become the team of the 1990s, and so it is easy to forget just what a bubbling mess of chaos and ineptitude the 1990 squad was.

They would have the worst record by any Yankees team in 77 years. They were constantly enmeshed in soap opera and distraction — mainly because that was the year George Steinbrenner had received what was then a lifetime ban by commissioner Fay Vincent for associating with gambler Howie Spira in order to get damaging information on Dave Winfield.

In what was to be his last act as principal owner, in late August of that season, Steinbrenner named Gene Michael general manager.

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It only changed Yankees history — and baseball history — forever.

Michael died of a heart attack Thursday at age 79. His final career average as a player was .229, but he was a giant of the game, the guy who put the cornerstones in place for the last Yankees dynasty.

Michael had a rambling, stream-of-consciousness way of speaking that could belie his brilliance about baseball. He was a savant at talent judgment, able to discern what others could not see while perhaps not being able to articulate it in words.

Late in that 1990 season — my second year as the Yankee beat reporter for The Post — Stick brought me into his office at the old Stadium. He started to point to numbers next to names: .257 for Oscar Azocar, .258 for Alvaro Espinoza, .259 for Bob Geren, .272 for Mel Hall and so on.

I was not sure what he was showing me. They were on-base percentages. I am sure Stick never read Bill James, and this was more than a decade before “Moneyball” would be published. But something sat wrong in his baseball soul. “Our offensive innings go too fast, we make it too easy on the pitcher, we have to have better at-bats.”

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Michael with Yankees GM Brian CashmanCharles Wenzelberg/New York Post

And from that was formed a philosophy that would transform the Yankees. Michael steadily removed the easy outs and first imported players such as Mike Gallego and Mike Stanley, professionals who helped the clubhouse and guys who worked the count. He stuck with Bernie Williams through a tough apprenticeship because he loved how disciplined Williams was.

In his most controversial move when enacted after the 1992 season, he traded Roberto Kelly, arguably the team’s best player, to Cincinnati for Paul O’Neill. He thought Williams was better than Kelly, that Kelly had peaked and was not ever going to turn at-bats into long fights, and he saw in O’Neill an intense hitter plus a lefty bat at a time when Michael wanted to get the Yanks back to using the Stadium dimensions to their favor.

He also hired Buck Showalter to his first managing job, eschewing veteran men he knew better such as Hal Lanier and Doug Rader because he saw something in Showalter. Together Michael and Showalter created a roster and culture that they would hand off to Joe Torre and Bob Watson and Brian Cashman for dynasty. They had formed a clubhouse of professionals and a roster of tough guys and tough outs.

Michael was always firm that the most important organization to scout was your own, and he made scads of trades to improve those early 1990 Yankees, but he never touched Williams, Derek Jeter, Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte or Jorge Posada, even at times when Steinbrenner — who returned in 1993 — would scream to do so. The Boss had a particular early fascination with wanting to get rid of Williams, and Stick would resort to lying that he had called other clubs and no one wanted Williams as a way to protect him.

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Michael (middle) with George Steinbrenner (right) and former Yankees president Lou Saban.AP

Of all the many employees who came and went under Steinbrenner, Michael was the one he trusted most — or the most by someone as impetuous as Steinbrenner. What made Michael so admired in the organization — beloved, actually — was his willingness to stand up to The Boss. Steinbrenner had layered his organization with spies and toadies, but no one ever thought that Michael retained employment as coach, manager, GM, scout or adviser for those reasons. He told Steinbrenner hard truths regardless of how that would affect his job.

Even when he left as GM after the 1995 season, he stayed with the organization as something akin to a guru, his wisdom and scouting acumen invaluable not only in player personnel but in training others to try to see and value what he saw and valued. Even as his health teetered in recent years and analytics took on a greater role, Michael would be dispatched by Cashman to watch a particular player, often in the Yankees organization, and his views remained as treasured as ever.

On a personal note, Michael was among a group of baseball people that includes Showalter who were incredibly generous with their time and insights and helped form how I see the game. Michael kindly would tell me often that I could be a GM, and I would always reply that my first move would be to hire him and fire myself so we could win.

Gene Michael had a warm, engaging personality. He could stand up in the middle of a room and suddenly break into a batting stance he had seen from a prospect 20 years earlier and describe why it would never work in the majors to make a point about someone playing now. He probably forgot more baseball over time than just about anyone else knows.

He will most be remembered for taking the ruins of the 1990 Yankees and forming the team of the ’90s. But you should know he was more than that. He was a good man, gone too soon.

How the Yankees proved sign-stealing suspicions

• 
  Andrew MarchandESPN Senior Writer

BALTIMORE -- New York Yankees manager Joe Girardi, general manager Brian Cashman and the team's players have long suspected that the Boston Red Sox were doing something illegal to steal pitches, according to sources. In the long tradition of the game, stealing signs has always been a part of it and there isn't even a rule against it.

But there is a code of how it should be done -- using electronics is against the rules -- and the Yankees suspected the Red Sox were using some form of electronic communication.

They couldn't prove it until their Aug. 18-20 series at Fenway Park. It was then where the Yankees used omnipresent video review cameras for instant replay to study the Red Sox, looking for evidence. It was, according to a source who reviewed the video, "blatant."

"It was something we suspected was going on," Yankees outfielder Brett Gardner said.

The Red Sox, sources said, were repeatedly receiving signs giving them, in the Yankees' eyes, an unfair advantage. The matter is under review by the commissioner's office.

What annoys the Yankees so much is that they believe the Red Sox have been doing this against all of their opponents. They have devised a scheme in which a member of their organization watches catchers to pick up the signs. The person quickly decodes the sequence that signifies the pitch that would be thrown.

Then, according to sources, the information would be texted to Red Sox assistant trainer Jon Jochim. Jochim would relay the information to Red Sox batters. When there was a runner on second, the runner would look in at the catcher, knowing the signs a team like the Yankees was using and then would pass the information to the batter, using an unspecified signal.

The Yankees have also been frustrated because All-Star catcher Gary Sanchez has been criticized for his incessant trips to the mound.

With the Red Sox unlikely being alone in stealing signs, Sanchez is constantly changing up the sequencing to try to stay one step ahead of the competition.

"We assume everyone is doing it, just to protect ourselves," Girardi said. "I'm not saying everyone is doing it, but as a team we assume that every team tries to do something."

The Red Sox incidents were different, though, because the use of technology made the information flow fast enough that in real time Jochim could relay it to players on second.

One incident, described by a source, involved catcher Christian Vazquez going to the dugout during a pitching change in the bottom of the seventh inning of the game on Aug. 18. Vazquez had reached second.

The source said that on the replay cameras, it was shown that Vazquez clearly received signs through Jochim that were relayed to the Red Sox batters. The Red Sox would go on to score four runs in a 9-6 comeback win. A review of the game on MLB.TV did not show the angles to confirm the information. Vazquez was unavailable for comment Tuesday night after Boston's marathon 19-inning win over Toronto.

A source thought that Boston's Mitch Moreland probably knew a changeup from hard-throwing Yankees reliever Tommy Kahnle was coming. The base hit provided the winning runs.

The Yankees were particularly incensed with how well the Red Sox hit with runners in scoring position. In the series in Boston, the Red Sox were 9-for-24 with runners on second and/or third, but in the teams' first 12 meetings this season, Boston was just 7-for-88 with runners in scoring position.

This was no consolation to the Yankees, who were livid to be looking up in the standings at the Red Sox, but feeling as if Boston was playing outside of the agreed rules of the game.

Meanwhile, Girardi said there was no way the Yankees used their home broadcast cameras to steal signs. A source said that the Red Sox were just trying to muddle the waters to try to win some PR points. For further emphasis, officials pointed out that the Yankees don't own the majority of the team's network, YES.

Art Briles Didn't Deserve a Second Chance in the CFL, or Anywhere Else

JON TAYLER

Monday August 28th, 2017

The now-deleted press release put out by the CFL’s Hamilton Tiger-Cats to announce the hiring of Art Briles as the team’s new offensive coordinator didn’t go light on his accomplishments. You’ll find his combined record as the head coach of Baylor and Houston; his Big 12 championships, awards and honors; his former players who have found their way to NFL stardom. But you won’t see anything about the culture of rape that Briles presided over and covered up at Baylor, or all his players who were accused of or charged with sexual assault, or any mention about how unrepentant he’s been about the entire scandal since being fired by the university last year. All you get is a list of the things he did right on the football field, and not the things he did off of it that should have barred him from ever coaching again.

The details of what happened at Baylor under Briles are sickening. At least 52 acts of rape committed by 31 different players between 2011 and ’14, including five gang rapes, according to a lawsuit filed earlier this year by a former Baylor student. Multiple instances of Briles and his staff either ignoring or covering up reports of assault and interfering with police investigations. Players not disciplined while victims were encouraged to keep quiet or leave the university. A blind eye toward accepting players with a history of violence toward women. Recruits enticed with alcohol and drugs at off-campus parties, with the coaching staff allegedly paying for women to have sex with them. Under Briles, Baylor’s focus was football, no matter what the moral or human cost.

Things only came to an end in 2015, following the arrest of former player Sam Ukwuachu, which began to raise unpleasant questions about what Briles knew and when. Lawsuits followed, all deepening the scandal. Down went Briles, as well as a number of other high-ranking officials at Baylor, including university president Ken Starr and athletic director Ian McCaw. But somehow, despite being the face of a program that had essentially condoned sexual assault, Briles didn’t find himself wanting for contacts elsewhere in football. He consulted for the Browns in October and for Florida Atlantic earlier this month through his son Kendal, who is an assistant there (though FAU head coach Lane Kiffin made clear that Briles had no formal role with the program). Rumors linked him to Auburn’s offensive coordinator gig, LSU’s search to replace Les Miles, and, briefly, Houston’s deliberations over candidates to take the place of Tom Herman.

Amid his attempts to worm his way back into football, Briles tried to clear his own name. Last August, he told reporters that he had “never done anything illegal, immoral [or] unethical.” In September, he gave a self-serving apology in an interview with ESPN in which the words “rape” and “sexual assault” were never used, and in which he says he and the school—which again, knowingly did nothing when told that players were committing rapes—“did the best we could at the time.” In March, he wrote an open letter in which he denied any role in covering up sexual or domestic assaults—a claim refuted by numerous reports that he did exactly that.

It would take some incredible mental gymnastics to believe any of Briles’s claims that he was ignorant of what was going on in his program, or that he and his staff took any real measures to stop his players. Even Briles himself seems to have acknowledged as much. In February, he dropped a defamation lawsuit against Baylor just days after the former student filed her lawsuit claiming that dozens of rapes had taken place during his tenure as head coach. Around the same time, the university released a score of text messages in response to another lawsuit, showing that Briles, McCaw and two assistant coaches had repeatedly tried to cover up several instances of rape, assault, drug use and other crimes by Baylor players.

But despite all of this horrible behavior and a lack of any real remorse on Briles’s part, there he was, for at least a few hours, getting another job in football. Anyone with Briles’s record of criminal negligence—who more or less condoned rape and assault in exchange for a winning program—has no place within the world of athletics, no matter what level.

To give Briles a job is to act as if every awful thing he did means nothing. Speaking about the hiring to CFL news site 3 Down Nation, Tiger-Cats CEO Scott Mitchell defended the hire, saying, “Art Briles is a good man who was caught in a very bad situation.”

Briles lost his job, but he somehow hadn’t become toxic enough to stay unemployed. His hope was likely that, with a couple of years of quiet coordinator work, he can resurface, forgotten by the public and long ago passed by the news cycle, with the stink of Baylor’s scandal no longer on him. His interviews and open letter were all about rehabilitating his image, and Hamilton was willing to provide him the next step in that process. (And the Tiger-Cats are apparently the most tone-deaf franchise in the world: Briles’s hire was announced the same day the team held a women’s clinic for female fans.)

“At the end of the day, I think people would agree that people deserve second chances,” Mitchell said. “Art Briles is a good person who deserves the opportunity to be a coach.” But even if his story ends in Canada, it should never have gotten to this point. His coaching career should have been buried and left for dead alongside the execrable likes of McCaw (who, it should be noted, found employment as the athletic director at Liberty) and Starr and everyone else who turned Baylor into a horror house. He never should have gotten a second chance. To hire him is to declare, somehow without shame, that football means more than human life—that Art Briles and others like him will only be defined by the games they win, and not the pain they cause in the process.

An Unrivaled Rivalry

This is a reprint of a Sports Illustrated article dated March 6, 1995

By Alexander Wolff

Art Heyman was an innocent when he left Long Island for the Triangle of North Carolina 35 years ago. A saint, no—Heyman played basketball and lived life with a hard-to-the-hole swagger—but a naif just the same. Duke? North Carolina? Heyman could barely tell a Tar Devil from a Blue Heel when he arrived at Raleigh-Durham Airport to play ball for. . . .

Well, he was going to play for North Carolina. He had even signed a grant-in-aid to attend Chapel Hill. But that was before his campus visit, during which his stepfather said something about Tar Heel coach Frank McGuire running "a factory," and McGuire took offense, and Heyman had to keep the two men from throwing punches at each other.

So Heyman wound up going to Duke, where Vic Bubas had just taken over as coach. "My friends from New York, Larry Brown and Doug Moe, they were at Carolina," Heyman says today. "If Duke hadn't been there to pick me up at the airport, I would have just gone down the road and started school there."

He soon learned that there is no such thing as "just going down" Tobacco Road. In a freshman game against Carolina, Moe, Heyman's supposed friend, spat at him. The next season, with Heyman now playing on the Blue Devil varsity, Brown, who would have been his roommate in Chapel Hill, engaged him in fisticuffs, which escalated into a brawl that required 10 cops to break up. A Durham lawyer with ties to the Tar Heels would swear out an assault warrant against Heyman over an altercation with a North Carolina male cheerleader during the brawl. And Heyman believes private detectives hired by Tar Heel partisans tailed him for the rest of his career, which may explain why as a senior he was arrested at a Myrtle Beach, S.C., motel—where he and a lady friend had checked in as Mr. and Mrs. Oscar Robertson—and charged with transporting a woman across state lines for immoral purposes.

By the time he was named national Player of the Year in 1963, Heyman had been vilified, castigated and pilloried, all in the name of shades of blue. Feelings between the two schools got so hostile that Bubas's daughters famously refused to eat a birthday cake because the color of its icing was too close to Carolina blue. To be sure, there had been earlier flare-ups in this neighborhood feud; when the Blue Devils beat up on McGuire's first teams, in the early 1950s, Duke students mocked the Tar Heel coach by slicking back their hair and donning silly ties, and Blue Devil players dribbled over to the Carolina bench to taunt him. The rivalry would stagnate somewhat during the early 1980s, when the Tar Heels' dominance helped them build what's currently a 115-78 overall lead in the series. But the feud heated up again with the Blue Devils' resurgence later in the decade, and today nothing quite compares to what happens when Duke tips off against North Carolina.

Between them the two schools have won four NCAA titles in 13 years and three of the last four. They account for six of the 20 spots in the last five Final Fours. In the trigonometry of the Triangle that encompasses Chapel Hill, Durham and Raleigh, Duke and Carolina are straight lines forming a right angle; you won't find their players on public assistance 10 years out or the schools' names in the police blotter of The NCAA News. "All the players know what kind of game it will be, even if one team is starting five scholarship players and the other starts five walk-ons," says Tar Heel guard Jeff McInnis. Like Gore Vidal and Norman Mailer, the two teams can cut each other up in public and then retreat to their adjacent villas and their snifters of brandy, content that they're the very best at what they do.

Last season they met when ranked one-two in the AP poll, and there ensued an appropriately terrific game won by No. 2 North Carolina 89-78. But on Feb. 2 of this season, with the Blue Devils an uncharacteristic 0-7 in the ACC and their coach, Mike Krzyzewski, out for the year with a bad back, and the second-ranked Tar Heels heavily favored, they played an even better game: a 102-100 double-overtime epic of which the winning coach, Carolina's Dean Smith, who has seen a lot, said, "I've never seen anything like it."

That night, a Duke assistant coach says, he witnessed three of the best plays he has ever seen college players make: 6'6" Tar Heel Jerry Stackhouse's in-transition flight past one Duke big man, Cherokee Parks, and over another, Erik Meek, to the far side of the rim for a reverse jam; a tap dunk in traffic by North Carolina's 6'10" Rasheed Wallace; and Parks's block of a dunk attempt by Stackhouse in the final minute of regulation. All three plays were incidental to the evening's greater drama, which actually made ESPN2 color commentator Dick Vitale's hyperventilations seem . . . considered. Animated by excellence, informed by tradition and stoked by proximity, Duke versus North Carolina stands as the one rivalry all other rivalries secretly wish to be.

A glance at the two institutions would never suggest this. The University of North Carolina is a restrained collection of colonial buildings locked in a town-gown clinch with Chapel Hill, a village so archetypally collegiate that once when there was talk of establishing a state zoo, fuddy-duddy senator Jesse Helms (R., N.C.) is said to have suggested simply throwing a fence around the entire place. By contrast, Duke is Gothic, sedate and remote. With an undergraduate student body only a quarter the size of Carolina's and drawn largely from points north, Duke is private in both charter and, in its redoubt up Highway 15-501, situation.

Yet the campuses sit only eight miles apart, and the municipalities of Chapel Hill and Durham abut one another. For several years not long ago, Krzyzewski and Smith had daughters studying with the same piano teacher. Professors at the two schools collaborate on research and team-teach. Students from one campus check out everything from parties to library books at the other.

For years the official capacities of each campus arena crept up in telling increments, with each school expanding its building in turn or reinstalling or reconfiguring seats. All this groping for a recruiting advantage ended in 1986, when the Tar Heels opened their 21,572-seat Dean E. Smith Center. As it happened, at the Dean Dome's first public event Mickie Krzyzewski, Mike's wife, found herself in the only broken seat in the house. Embarrassed, an arena official offered to move her anywhere else. Wife K, steeped in the protocol of the rivalry, proudly refused to budge.

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Freshmen arriving in the Triangle go through much the same indoctrination as Heyman did in the meaning of the word clan. "You'll always be my boy," Tar Heel alum and then Chicago Bull Michael Jordan told Chris Collins, a former Bull ball boy, after Collins signed with Duke several years ago. "But now that you're a Dookie, I can't talk to you anymore."

"I think he was kidding," Collins says today.

"Coming from New Jersey, I liked Carolina and Duke," says Tar Heel senior forward Pat Sullivan. "I was friendly with [Blue Devils] Grant Hill, Tony Lang and Kenny Blakeney from summer camps, and my first year I thought we might hang out." Hah. Hanging out is done for only one purpose. "If you beat Carolina, you wanted to go over there the next day," says Hill. Adds former Tar Heel guard Derrick Phelps, "If we won, they'd be seeing us in Durham."

Thus does every meeting take on huge significance. "If you're having a poor season and you beat Carolina, you've had a good season," says former Duke guard Bob Bender, who is now the coach at Washington. "If you're having a great season and you lose twice to Carolina, you've had a tarnished season. And if you lose three times to Carolina . . . well, you've had a tragic season. My junior year we almost played five times: We met them once in the old Big Four tournament, twice in the regular season and once in the ACC tournament. The teams were in the same regional in the NCAAs, but both got beat. Imagine playing a game that intense five times in a year."

You imagine it, and then watch someone who nearly did it shake his head fretfully at the very thought. "It's a good reason," says Bender, "to go to Wake [Forest] or [N.C.] State."

Once vested in the rivalry, the players embrace it spiritedly. Before his last regular-season game, in 1981 against the Tar Heels, Duke's Gene Banks put on a tuxedo and threw roses to the crowd at Cameron. A few hours later, with a second left to play in regulation, Banks stuck a thorn of a turnaround jumper in North Carolina to force overtime in a game the Blue Devils would win 66-65. "It was the closest I've ever felt to being next to God," Banks has said. "And I don't mean that to be blasphemous."

Former Tar Heel James Worthy still tells Smith that he never lost to Duke, because a sprained ankle kept him out of a Carolina loss to the Blue Devils. But no one recalls minor details like Worthy's absence. "It really is the schools, not the players," says Smith. "Like the end of the 1993 season, when we beat them, Grant Hill was out. But there's no asterisk. Only, `We beat Duke.' "

This season the rivalry has spilled into the college basketball press, which is peopled disproportionately by graduates of the two schools. North Carolina alumnus Art Chansky, who edits a Tar Heel annual called Carolina Court, recently wrote a screed in which he called Duke a "haven for hype and hypocrisy." Noting that the line outside Cameron's only women's room forms late in the first half and lasts well beyond intermission, he pronounced Duke's holy shrine a place "where there's more brass in the railings than porcelain in the bathrooms."

A riposte of sorts came from John Feinstein, who reported on ESPN2 in January that Wallace was blowing off classes. "The first thing you have to understand," said Smith in denying the report, "is [John's] a Duke graduate."

"Ever since that comment, it's all I think of," Wallace said on the eve of the teams' game last month. "A couple of days ago I didn't want to get out of bed. Then I thought of Feinstein." Wallace's characterization of the ESPN2 report as "just something to amp the Duke-Carolina game" rang true when he made 10 of 11 shots in the Tar Heels' victory.

The hostility that the rivalry produces sometimes seems outsized, even a little trumped up, because Krzyzewski and Smith have much more in common than their fans care to admit. Each was in his early 30's when he took over at his school. Smith was hung in effigy during his third season, while Krzyzewski might as well have been hung at the same juncture of his career. Each coach took six seasons to win his first ACC title, and for years each bore the rap of not being able to win an NCAA crown despite a string of Final Four appearances. While Smith has won 78% of his games, Krzyzewski, at age 48, has a .738 winning percentage, a record virtually identical to Smith's after the same number of seasons. Each coach has wrought a paradox—Krzyzewski, the West Point-trained conservative, believes in a free-form, almost permissive approach to the game; Smith, a liberal Democrat who campaigned for integrated lunch counters and a nuclear freeze, presides over the nation's most corporate program. And each coach has a voice that seems to emanate from deep inside a considerable honker.

"You know what I really like?" Krzyzewski says through his aquiline proboscis. "We know they're doing it right, and they know we're doing it right. They have their style of doing things, and we have ours. But it's all good. Not just good, it's excellent. And in an environment of excellence, we've made each other better."

Smith has never much cottoned to the push-each-other-to-new-heights theory. "That's like saying I'm not going to work hard unless Duke has a good team," he says through his bulbous schnozz.

But Krzyzewski calls his bluff. "Hey, all I heard [during the 1992-93 season, after Duke had won two straight NCAA titles] was them saying they were tired of us. And if I were them, I would have been tired of us too. Actually, I'm tired of them from 1993 [when Carolina won the title]. The good thing is there's mutual respect among players and coaches."

Mostly it's the fans who cultivate the hatred. Encountering a North Carolina fan, a Dookie will engage in one-upmanship as if it were so much badinage about the weather: The Blue Devils' Mark Alarie scored the first basket in the Dean Dome; Tar Heel great Phil Ford was married in Duke Chapel; the chancellor at Chapel Hill, Paul Hardin III, holds two degrees from Duke; the Blue Devils, in 1979, once led Carolina 7-0 after a half in which the Tar Heels' Rich Yonakor threw up two air balls, an achievement that is believed to have spawned the chant that has since spread from Cameron to every arena in the land. Sometimes a simple name is enough to get a Tar Heel's goat: e.g., that of Fred Lind—the Duke backup center who, after having scored 12 points all season, had 16 points and nine rebounds and made two clutch shots to force two overtimes in the Blue Devils' 87-86 triple-OT victory in '68.

Tar Heel fans simply counter with "Bobby Jones." He stole an inbounds pass and tossed in an off-balance layup in the final second to beat Duke in 1974. Then they go on: Duke athletic director Tom Butters, as chairman of the NCAA Basketball Selection Committee, had to present the championship trophy to Smith in 1993; former Duke president Terry Sanford has two degrees from Carolina; the '74 Tar Heels came back from—remember these numbers, now—eight points down with 17 seconds left in regulation to beat Duke in OT.

The two schools have never met in an NCAA championship game, although it's bound to happen one of these days. Smith is on record as saying he wouldn't mind such a matchup. But Krzyzewski—could he possibly do anything else?—disagrees. He recounts how once, after a North Carolina victory over Duke, a gang of students followed his eldest daughter, Debbie, through the halls of her junior high school in Durham, bumping and taunting her to tears. Even teachers joined in, writing "Go Heels!" in the margins of papers before returning them to her. "I can live with losing to any school," Krzyzewski says. "But what would happen in this area peoplewise if one of us beat the other in the championship game I wouldn't wish on anybody, it would be so horrible."

Each coach insists that there's much more to his job than preparing his team to "beat thy neighbor" several times a year. "It's not like the old Michigan-Ohio State and Nebraska-Oklahoma rivalries in football, where nobody else in our conference can beat us," says Smith. Adds Krzyzewski, "I want to see bumper stickers and T-shirts that say DUKE: ACC CHAMPS, not 81-77." But the coaches' protestations are wasted on the clerks who pack semiconductors down at Research Triangle Park and the farmers who cure leaves in the region's tobacco barns and the members of what are known as "divided families."

Angie and Bennett Roberts live in one such pitiable household. They pay Durham taxes and have a Chapel Hill zip code. She comes from a long conga line of Duke people; he looks at the powder-blue sky and takes it as a sign that the raiments of God himself, like Tar Heel uniforms, are trimmed in Alexander Julian argyle. When Angie was expecting their first child, it was settled: If it was a girl, Mom would tell her bedtime stories about how, when Smith was coaching the 1976 U.S. Olympic team, Mama's family was rooting for the Russians; if it was a boy, Dad would set him on a knee and tell him that they're not called Devils for nothing.

As it happened, Angie gave birth to a girl, Madison. But had she had a boy, it wouldn't have mattered. "I would have had him all day long," she says.

As expectations in both camps have soared during the 1990s—for the first four years of this decade, one school or the other either won an NCAA crown or had the nation's best recruiting class—passions like the Robertses' have become inflamed accordingly. "Duke was the first school to challenge Carolina," says Chansky, who cofounded Four Corners, a Chapel Hill eatery where everything from the decor to the menu would give a Dookie indigestion. "And Duke is the only one to pass Carolina. It's been threatening as hell to Carolina people. There has been some anger, some hurt, some resentment. Plus, there's the natural evolution of things. You have to get old, and Dean is 64. Well, the Duke people must have thought they had that coffin nailed shut. But guess what? He's baaaaack! Duke hasn't kept Dean in coaching or kept him competitive. But it's made him a little more competitive, more keen to coach."

A few years ago a friend with royal-blue bloodlines, the son-in-law of former Duke basketball All-America Dick Groat, gave Chansky a dog. The dog came with a name—Hurley, after then Blue Devil guard Bobby—but Chansky decided not to change it, "because he's short, white, runs a lot and whines occasionally, and besides, I thought it would be a sensitizing experience. And you know what? I haven't minded Duke as much the last few years. Even if there are now six classes of Duke kids who think it's their birthright to go to the Final Four."

Ah, Duke kids. They're the ones who bivouac outside Cameron by the hundreds—sometimes weeks in advance for a game against Carolina. They once chanted "In-hale, ex-hale" at the Tar Heels' Steve Hale when he played with a collapsed lung. They captioned a huge cavity on a page in The Duke Chronicle thusly: "This big, useless white space was put here to remind you of [Tar Heel center] Eric Montross." They brandished signs calling Carolina's Mike O'Koren, who suffered from a skin problem, the OXY-1000 POSTER CHILD. Nowadays they wear T-shirts bearing Smith's likeness and the legend YOU'LL NEVER BE LIKE MIKE.

Over at the Dean Dome the multitudes may be a "wine-and-cheese crowd," as former Florida State guard Sam Cassell pronounced them several years ago, but when Duke comes through they turn hard-liquor-and-limburger. There was such joy when the Tar Heels beat the defending NCAA champion Blue Devils in a 1992 regular-season game that fans stormed the floor and police had to barricade Franklin Street, Chapel Hill's main boulevard. Several months earlier someone had stolen a ball and net from the 1991 Final Four out of the trophy case in the lobby of Cameron. The booty turned up the next day, neatly arrayed around the Old Well on the Carolina campus, along with a writ of penance: "I will not snatch Duke's priceless championship memorabilia"—repeated 100 times.

Scan the sweep of the series, and you can trace each rekindling of the rivalry to a recruit over whom the two schools fought. Heyman never again lost to the Tar Heels after the Brawl, and he went for 40 points against them in his final game. A few years later Smith saved his job when he prevailed upon a Pennsylvania high school star named Larry Miller, whom everyone had expected to attend Duke, to enroll at Chapel Hill; in Miller's senior season the Tar Heels beat the Blue Devils for the first of Smith's many ACC tournament titles.

So it has gone, back and forth, over the years: A player North Carolina sorely wanted, Dick DeVenzio, chose Duke in 1969, and he would have the satisfaction of hearing Smith say, following a 91-83 Blue Devil win in '70, "This game was decided a year ago when Dick DeVenzio decided to go to Duke." The Tar Heels struck back with O'Koren, someone Duke was certain it would sign because as a junior O'Koren had won a New Jersey state high school title while playing alongside a senior named Jim Spanarkel, who had since become the Blue Devils' point guard. Soon thereafter Banks, who turned down Carolina, helped Duke go from sixth to second in the league and reach the '78 NCAA title game.

While the Blue Devils never came close to landing any of the Jordan-Worthy-Sam Perkins triumvirate that delivered Smith's first NCAA crown, in 1982, Duke reestablished itself in '85 with the signing of Danny Ferry, whom Krzyzewski calls "probably the first big-name guy to choose my program over North Carolina's." Since then Coach K has more than held his own, skillfully using the early-signing period to coax such players as Hill, Hurley and Christian Laettner into turning right, not left, off I-40 on their way in from the airport.

Smith can live with the occasional loss of a prospect. "We get Montross," he says. "The next year the best big man is Cherokee Parks, and they get him. I don't get too upset." Adds Krzyzewski, "Some of who-gets-whom has to do with who got the last one."

But the currently lofty level of the series can be traced less to a particular recruit than to a particular moment on a particular night when a particular fist came thundering down hard on the scorer's table. A few days before, president Sanford had upbraided the Duke students for showering condoms and panties on a Maryland player recently involved in an incident with a coed. So, as the top-ranked Tar Heels took the floor at Cameron on Jan. 21, 1984, the students wore halos fashioned out of coat hangers and aluminum foil, and they held aloft unctuous signs bidding A HEARTY WELCOME TO COACH DEAN SMITH AND THE NORTH CAROLINA TAR HEELS.

With a few minutes left in the first half Smith became exasperated because a player of his wasn't promptly buzzed into the game. He approached the scorer's table, hoping to get someone to stop the clock. When play nonetheless continued, he impulsively tried to sound the horn himself. In his clumsiness he hit the wrong button and put 20 extra points on the board for the Tar Heels. In the ensuing pandemonium, Smith received no technical foul, and North Carolina went on to win. Afterward Krzyzewski was so angry that his pores spoke. "Our students had class, and our team had class," he said. "There was not a person on our bench who was pointing at officials or banging on scorer's tables. . . . So let's get some things straight around here and quit the double standard that exists in this league."

Perhaps it's coincidence, but within a week Krzyzewski, to that point 51-52 at Duke and prospective carrion for buzzardly boosters, signed a five-year contract extension. "When I first got into the league, I didn't want to hang our hats on a win over North Carolina," he says. "Hell, my first four or five years, how would we beat North Carolina? I wanted our own identity. But at that time there were two tiers in the ACC—North Carolina and everybody else. I felt people had fallen into the habit, subconsciously or not, of That's the way it is."

Since the Double Standard Game the series has been virtually even: 15-12 in North Carolina's favor. "So much good has happened to both programs since that [double standard] remark," says Al Featherston of the Durham Herald-Sun, who has witnessed more than 70 games between the Blue Devils and the Tar Heels since 1960. "You might say that Duke and Carolina have become the game's double standard."

Several years later another jolt of voltage coursed through the rivalry. "I consider Dean a friend, even if we don't smoke from the same pack of cigarettes," Krzyzewski said, making catty reference to Smith's habit, since kicked, of supporting the state's biggest cash crop. Around the same time signs saying J.R. CAN'T REID appeared at several of North Carolina's road games, targeting the Tar Heels' J.R. Reid, who is both perfectly literate and black. This angered Smith enough to move him to point out that the combined SAT scores of Reid and another black Tar Heel, Scott Williams, exceeded those of two white Duke players Carolina had also recruited, Ferry and Laettner. Smith has since said he was trying to make a point about the evils of racial stereotyping, but others believe there was more at play. "I think that remark was a sign that Duke was getting to him," says Barry Jacobs, whose book Three Paths to Glory chronicles the interplay between the two schools and N.C. State, which sits some 30 miles away in Raleigh. "It was very un-Dean-like to violate those kids' privacy."

That exchange set up the single most intense renewal of the series, the 1989 ACC tournament final in Atlanta. Carolina had gone seven years without winning the tourney title, and the Tar Heels had lost three times to the Blue Devils the year before, in what Duke folks still call the "Triple Crown Season." People who saw the game, which Carolina won 77-74 after Ferry's 75-footer at the buzzer hit the back of the rim, flinch when they recall it. At one point Krzyzewski, frustrated by the level of contact, screamed at Williams, "Don't foul so hard!"

Up got Smith. "Don't talk to my players!" he hollered.

At this point Krzyzewski turned to Smith and spewed forth a hard Anglo-Saxon monosyllable beginning with f, followed by the second-person pronoun.

There's no evidence that this utterance caused the earth to wobble on its axis. But it's probably safe to say that no one had ever before directed this combination of words at Dean Edwards Smith. And that it took a Duke man to do it is not lost on one erstwhile Blue Devil.

"We," says Art Heyman, with a nod to fellow carpetbaggers Doug Moe and Larry Brown, "started it all."

Down eight, 17 seconds to play. Those were the circumstances, resonant with history, that faced Duke in the first overtime on Feb. 2. It's precisely where North Carolina had stood 21 years earlier, and the Tar Heels had come back and won. So why would anyone doubt that the Blue Devils could do so too? The events of the evening so far had been improbable enough. Carolina had knocked down its first nine shots and taken a 17-point first-half lead after Stackhouse's free throw following that reverse windmill dunk. Then, after the half, Duke sank 12 of its first 14 shots to go ahead by nine. The Devils still led by nine late in the game, only to watch Carolina rally to force the first overtime.

Still, the crew working the Raycom broadcast of the game looked at the Tar Heels' eight-point lead and began rolling the credits. Commentator Billy Packer declared Duke to be 0-8 in the ACC. On Franklin Street, patrons poured from the bars to begin their alfresco celebrations. And that's when Carolina's lead began to disappear into a sort of Triangle Bermuda Triangle.

Duke's Trajan Langdon sank a shot from beyond the arc to make the score 94-89. McInnis dropped in a free throw, but 10 seconds later Blue Devil Jeff Ca pel scored a layup, drew a foul and converted an old-fashioned three-point play. Suddenly Duke trailed only 95-92. Serge Zwikker soon found himself standing at the line for Carolina, contemplating two foul shots with four seconds remaining. He missed the first, then the second, at which point Capel rushed up the floor. Leaping off one foot, he looped the ball toward the hoop from a few steps inside half-court.

From his vantage point Tar Heel guard Pearce Landry knew the shot would fall. "It's the Cameron ghosts,'' he would say. "You know a shot like that is going in as soon as it goes up. You can't fight the ghosts." And so the television guys went nowhere, and the premature celebrants filed back into the boites of Franklin Street, and Packer and Vitale resumed their keening.

Fate didn't come entirely draped in royal blue this time, for Duke didn't win in the second overtime. But only by a few inches—Blue Devil freshman Steve Wojciechowski bounced a 10-footer off the back of the rim just before the buzzer sounded—was Duke deprived of a third overtime in which it might have done unto Carolina what the Tar Heels had once done unto Duke. The two teams merely demonstrated anew that they share something rare and exclusive in their rivalry without rival. "This game went two overtimes because they're Duke and we're Carolina," said guard Donald Williams. "It was the rivalry. Period."

A spot of brandy?

"It didn't matter what the records were," said Parks. "It never matters. It's always like this."

Grand idea. Cheers.

Earlier that evening, an hour or so before the 9 p.m. tip-off, a sportswriter had greeted Pete Gaudet, Krzyzewski's beleaguered, winless-in- the-league stand-in. "Got to do something about these nine-o'clock tips," the sportswriter had said, referring to the deadline difficulties he and his 200 credentialed colleagues would encounter before the night was through.

Gaudet's reply says all that needs saying about the covenant Duke and North Carolina enter into every time they share a court.

"Yeah," he said, "we should be into the second overtime right about now."