By: Laramie Ward January 7, 2019
access minutes before the 9:00 tip-off because of ‘double ticketing.’ Many people had sold their tickets online because they couldn’t make it to the original game, but since there was no time to mail in the actual tickets, their barcodes were voided before they had been resold. Once the game was postponed and rescheduled, the Duke-Carolina tickets quickly became the hottest of the season. The Tar Heels won 74-66. Since the 1949-50 season, UNC has scored 13,581 points against Duke and allowed 13,559. That's a difference of just 22 points over 179 games, or 0.1 per matchup. This is one of the simple reasons as to why I believe Carolina is the continuously stronger team in this Blue Divide.
Basketball started nearly 158 years ago when P.E. instructor James Naismith was tasked with finding something more involved and engaging than calisthenics. He created it during a cold winter, with an empty gym, 2 peach baskets, and a soccer ball. This isn’t the cool part, though. Dean Smith attended the University of Kansas and played for Phog Allen before he graduated with a degree in mathematics in 1953. Allen was a legendary coach who had played at Kansas for Naismith starting in 1904. So there you go: the game traveled directly from Naismith to Allen to Smith. Smith believed that it was important for his players to get a good and well-rounded education, and because of that, over 95% of his players earned their college degrees. He worked to clean up UNC’s image, and in all of his seasons, his program was never charged with a single violation. He also joined in on several protests on campus against segregation and had outspoken support for several other topics such as nuclear disarmament and abolition of the death penalty. As Mike Krzyzewski said, Dean Smith “...set a standard that you had to adopt or else you dropped by the wayside. He was one of the great pioneers, and that doesn’t even describe it. He built a program when most people didn’t even know what a program was...He recruited unbelievably great kids, developed great relationships with them, and they played a brand of basketball where they showed up every night...Dean has really been something special for the game of basketball. And to share something with him for this moment is a good thing, a really good thing.”
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