Maybe It Is Time To Overreact

Every Duke preseason follows a familiar routine. During the summer, fans overanalyze every little scrap of intel or footage from early practices. Come the fall, the chatter becomes louder and the excitement builds, cluminating in a lofty pre-season poll ranking. By the time the team finally hits the floor against a real opponent in the exhibition season, the pent up energy of six months without Duke Basketball makes every fan prone to overreact to those first real glimpses of the squad.

Overreacting to an exhibition result almost always is a mistake. Last night was the “almost.”

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It’s hard to overstate how dominant the Blue Devils looked in their dismantling of Tennessee. Six different Duke players scored before Tennessee exceeded six total points. 12 minutes into the game, the Blue Devils had tripled up the visiting Volunteers. For the game, Duke shot 20% better from the field than Tennessee.

Statistic after statistic shows pure and utter domination.

Yes, this was still an exhibition and Tennessee was not at full strength (although notably neither was Duke without Caleb Foster and Drew Scharnowski). That would be important context if this was a tighter contest. But that possibility was essentially out the window 10 minutes into the game.

The fact is that Tennessee came into Cameron Indoor Stadium wanting to win a game in the greatest arena in the sport. And they were humiliated.

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Strangely, the best analogue for this performance is not any of the contemporary, televised exhibitions against Division I opponents. It is, instead, Mike Krzyzewski’s old tradition of inviting the reigning Division II National Champion for an exhibition contest each year. The question in those contests was never whether Duke would win, but by how much and how good they’d look doing it. There were many years in which the Blue Devils would come out sluggish and not defeat an inferior opponent with the efficiency fans would expect. A 40 point victory—a margin that could have…

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Publish date : 2026-10-21 17:32:00

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