Carolina and Duke are both overrated in the preseason poll.
Are rankings before the first game based on how strong teams are to start the season, or where they will be at NCAA tournament time? It must be the latter, based on the poll released this week before the first games have been played.
Duke is an overwhelming favorite as No. 1 and UNC is No. 9. Both positions must be where pundits think they will wind up five months from now, because the Blue Devils and Tar Heels have serious questions that can only be answered by playing the stiffest competition in January and February.
Look what happened to Duke last year, when it also opened as No. 1, with four starters back and five freshmen who all hoped to be one-and-dones. Isn’t that a potentially better team than one with a single returning starter and as many as ten without experience vying for playing time? The 2017 Blue Devils finished fifth in the ACC standings, and did not advance beyond the second round of the NCAA tournament.
College basketball is all about playing as a team, sharing the ball, the minutes and the statistics. Chemistry will determine how good Duke can be, as its one-and-done philosophy over the last seven years has yielded just one Final Four trip. That one Final Four appearance was by a 2015 team whose freshmen stars had been playing together for years of AAU basketball.
Carolina is hardly a top ten team to open the season for other reasons. The best rebounding club in college basketball last year lost its top three post men, and this week Roy Williams said that his four freshmen big men have yet to show any of the qualities to be successful college players. He hopes that changes, but having coached seniors Brice Johnson, Kennedy Meeks and Isaiah Hicks to the past two Final Fours he knows reaching it a third consecutive time is a long shot.
The Blue Devils have four 5-star frosh to join mercurial senior captain Grayson Allen in the starting lineup. They will get an early test against second-ranked Michigan State in December in Chicago. But, like whether UNC can develop an inside presence to go with a great perimeter, that game won’t tell much about how Duke will be when it counts – in March.
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So give the other 8 schools that should be ahead of UNC. Yes UNC is without it’s post players, but Hicks played limited minutes due to foul trouble, and the backcourt is ridiculous. Other teams have gotten by with limited post play.