Historically Speaking, Hubert Davis Ranks
As UNC’s Expert In Major Upsets Of Duke
By David Glenn
North Carolina Sports Network
In the modern history of the Carolina-Duke men’s basketball rivalry, going back to the 1980-81 season, there have been 27 games in which the teams entered the matchup with truly lopsided reputations.
Most of the time, of course, thanks to the legendary tenures of Hall of Fame coaches such as Dean Smith, Roy Williams and Mike Krzyzewski, both teams have been nationally ranked when they faced each other. Occasionally, as in their 2021 and 2023 home-and-away matchups, neither was in the Top 25.
The most lopsided games occur when one team is in the more elite tier of the Top 25 — the national Top 10 — and the other team isn’t ranked at all heading into one of the hotly contested rivalry’s head-to-head matchups.
The lopsided description applies once again Saturday (6:30 p.m., ESPN), when #2 Duke (27-3, 18-1 ACC) visits unranked UNC (20-11, 13-6 ACC) at the Smith Center. The Blue Devils have lost only once since November, they have the possible National Player of the Year in freshman forward Cooper Flagg, and they are listed as a 10-point favorite over the Tar Heels.
In those most lopsided Carolina-Duke matchups of the past 45 years, as you might expect, the highly ranked favorite has won a large majority of the time — 21 times in 27 chances, to be exact, for a success rate of approximately 78 percent.
That means, of course, that the heavy underdog has sprung the upset only six times since the 1979-80 season.
UNC was the victorious underdog all six times.
Amazingly, Hubert Davis was personally involved in five of those six hard-to-believe Carolina victories — twice as a player (both in 1990), once as an assistant coach under Williams (2014), and twice more as the Tar Heels’ head coach (both in 2022).
Going all the way back to that 1980-81 season, the unranked Tar Heels have turned the tables on the heavily favored and top-10 Blue Devils three times in Chapel Hill (1990, 2003, 2014), twice in Durham (1990, 2022) and, most famously, at the 2022 Final Four in New Orleans, in the final game of Coach K’s illustrious career.
(Side note: The most recent example of an unranked Duke team beating a top-10 Carolina squad came during the 1979-80 campaign, the season before Coach K succeeded Bill Foster in Durham.)
In 1990, Davis was a sophomore sharpshooter in Smith’s regular playing rotation, usually as the first player off the bench. He was the Tar Heels’ fourth-leading scorer that season, behind Rick Fox, Scott Williams and Kevin Madden, at about 10 points per game. Davis shot about 40 percent from 3-point territory.
Although the 1989-90 Tar Heels finished only 8-6 in the ACC and 21-13 overall, they swept the mighty Blue Devils, who boasted three All-ACC performers (Christian Laettner, Phil Henderson, Alaa Abdelnaby) to the Tar Heels’ one (Fox), won 29 games overall, and made it all the way to the NCAA championship game before getting clobbered there by UNLV.
In 2014, Davis was three years into his nine-year tenure as an assistant coach under Williams. UNC’s best player that year, sophomore guard Marcus Paige (now an assistant coach under Davis), took control of the game in the second half against #5 Duke, and the Tar Heels — who had started 0-3 in conference play that season and had suffered several surprising losses — won in front of a Carolina-friendly crowd at the Smith Center.
Most recently, in 2022, Davis was the Tar Heels’ head coach for one of the most stunning runs in Carolina basketball history. In the span of about one month, UNC went from being an NCAA Tournament bubble team to becoming one of the most sensational squads in America. During that run all the way to the national championship game, Davis authored two of the most powerful head-to-head daggers in the history of the celebrated Carolina-Duke rivalry.
First, Davis led the unranked Tar Heels to a stunning 94-81 victory over #4 Duke at Cameron Indoor Stadium — on “Coach K Court” — in the long-planned, much-celebrated, jam-packed, celebrities-everywhere final home game of Krzyzewski’s 42-year tenure in Durham. Earlier in the season, the Blue Devils had hammered the Heels in Chapel Hill by an 87-67 margin. In the rematch, exactly one month later, UNC had four players (Armando Bacot-23, Caleb Love-22, RJ Davis-21, Brady Manek-20) score 20 or more points in the same game for the first time in program history.
Almost one month later, on April 2, Carolina and Duke finally experienced something truly unprecedented in the history of their famously intense rivalry, which dates to 1920. The Tar Heels and the Blue Devils faced each other at the Final Four. UNC, still unranked and only a #8 seed in the Big Dance, then sent Coach K into retirement and the second-seeded Blue Devils back to Durham with an unforgettable 81-77 defeat.
It’s important to remember that such upsets have been the relatively rare exceptions to a long-standing trend. Indeed, ESPN Analytics gives this year’s UNC squad only a 21 percent chance of springing an upset on Saturday.
A little more than a month ago, when the unranked Tar Heels visited #2 Duke, they got absolutely annihilated.
The Blue Devils led 47-25 at the half, shot 50 percent or better from both the field and 3-point range, and turned the ball over only eight times. UNC rallied a bit in the second half, making the final score 87-70, but the game’s outcome had become clear before the break. In particular, Carolina had no answer for Flagg (21 points, eight rebounds, seven assists, three steals, two blocks) or the Devils’ other top freshman, Kon Knueppel (22 points, five rebounds, five assists).
The Tar Heels who visited Durham were in the midst of an ugly stretch in which they lost five of seven games.
The Tar Heels who will host Duke in Chapel Hill on Saturday have won six consecutive contests, albeit entirely against teams with losing records in conference play. Despite that winning streak, most bracketologists believe UNC needs at least one more high-impact victory (on Saturday and/or next week at the ACC Tournament) to rise above this year’s NCAA Tournament bubble.
So, which version of Carolina will show up at the Smith Center this weekend?
While Davis didn’t answer any direct questions about Duke after the Tar Heels’ most recent victory, at Virginia Tech, he did discuss his team’s upward trends in recent weeks.
“We just have a number of guys that are settled and very confident and playing at a high level at the same time,” Davis said. “We’ve got a number of guys that are at the highest in terms of confidence and comfort out there, in terms of their role and what they need to do out there on the floor.”
CAROLINA-DUKE RIVALRY
Unranked Team Beats Top-10 Team
(Either Direction; 1980-81 To 2024-25)
Jan. 17, 1990: UNC 79, #8 Duke 60 in Chapel Hill (Dean Smith*-Mike Krzyżewski)
March 4, 1990: UNC 87, #5 Duke 75 in Durham (Dean Smith*-Mike Krzyzewski)
March 9, 2003: UNC 82, #10 Duke 79 in Chapel Hill (Matt Doherty-Mike Krzyzewski)
Feb. 20, 2014: UNC 74, #5 Duke 66 in Chapel Hill (Roy Williams^-Mike Krzyzewski)
March 5, 2022: UNC 94, #4 Duke 81 in Durham (Hubert Davis-Mike Krzyzewski)
April 2, 2022: UNC 81, #9 Duke 77 in New Orleans (Hubert Davis-Mike Krzyzewski)
*—Davis was a UNC player in these games
^—Davis was a UNC assistant coach in this game
NOTE: The top-10 teams are 21-6 over the unranked underdogs during these 45 seasons.
