So as you, my few readers, may have noticed, I just posted about Duke University of Durham, North Carolina. If you are from the Tobacco Road area, you are very familiar with the rivalry between Duke and UNC, which I discussed a bit on my very first post of this blog. Even if you aren't from the Chapel Hill-Durham area, you've heard of this rivalry, especially during basketball season. It's in the air we breathe around here. So without further ado, I bring you:
THE UNC-DUKE RIVALRY
[By the way, the color used to highlight UNC is the WRONG color. Technically, the blue used for Duke is also wrong, but they're more willing to use royal blue as "Duke blue". However, "Duke blue" is a different, darker shade of blue than royal blue. Fun fact.]
So the first matchup between the two schools
happened in basketball on
January 24, 1920. That's all that started it. That, and the fact that there two distinctly different schools were merely ten minutes apart from each other. As each year passed with the schools facing each other in basketball, the rivalry spread across their respective campuses to other sports. Indeed, the rivalry once was encapsulated in the annual
Carlyle Cup, which is determined by the number of sports each school wins (the Cup has no longer been awarded since 2011, due to a combination of the title sponsor
going out of business and at least one of the athletic departments
being unable to finance it).
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| Kenan Memorial Stadium at UNC (Source) |
However, the rivalry's presence is constantly felt (as I am personally aware between myself and my Duke-leaning friends). The basketball rivalry is the biggest aspect of the larger rivalry, with
over 250 face-offs, and UNC leading the series 134 to Duke's 108. Recently, Duke has done better; they won the NCAA in 2015 and managed to win the twice-a-year regular season games against UNC after Tyler Hansborough moved on to the NBA. But if you look at the longer "recent history" (since the 1980s or so),
both teams have had their series, with UNC doing better than Duke while certain players attended, and vice versa. Both teams are actually fantastic, with good established programs (both schools have won at least 5 national championships in basketball alone). So vying for the top ranks in the country is commonplace for both of them; however, if you speak to true fans, many of them don't care unless the other team is always defeated (I often say that I don't care if we win the national championship as long as we beat Duke every time we face them).
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| Dean E. Smith Center at UNC, a.k.a. the Dean Dome (Source) |
Another equally fierce aspect (though with a smaller spotlight than basketball) is the football rivalry. Both UNC and Duke have good programs and teams now, but I remember growing up with such a bad UNC football team that it was a shocker to be invited to a bowl game. However, Duke was worse off than us at that point; UNC would have at least one win on their record, but Duke would have none (often one of our wins, or our only win, was against Duke). Like with basketball, we didn't care too much about not going to a bowl game as long as we beat Duke. Unlike with basketball, there was actually a traveling trophy specifically for the Carolina-Duke football rivalry:
the Victory Bell. This is still being exchanged between the two schools as a symbol of the rivalry.
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| Cameron Indoor Stadium at Duke (Source) |
There's a fun
history blip in the football rivalry. In the late 1880s, the rules around collegiate football were changing with regards to the scheduling of games. Back when Duke was still known as Trinity College, they had beaten Wake, but Wake had beaten UNC, meaning that a Trinity-UNC game had to be held to determine the conference winner in 1889. Trinity proposed several dates before exams ended, and even offered to play the game in Chapel Hill due to silly faculty rules at UNC. The game needed to be scheduled/played before the end of the winter season on January 15. However, the game was never scheduled and thus never played. On the UNC side, the school claimed the end-of-season date was unconstitutional (according to what, I'm not sure), and claimed a forfeit victory. Trinity/Duke said "no, that date is legit" and also claimed a forfeit victory (clearly I'm paraphrasing, guys). To this day, there is still disagreement about each school's number of wins because of this.
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| Wallace Wade Stadium at Duke (Source) |
By the way, I couldn't find any UNC-sourced information about this, so my source may be biased. I definitely tried a couple of times to find some UNC-sourced information
online (I'm in no mood or position to be in the library in June), but couldn't. So UNC clearly needs to step up its game if it really wants to "claim the forfeit properly" and provide some evidence on its side of the story.
There are a couple of features with regards to the social aspect of the rivalry, particularly in context of basketball games. At UNC, the home Duke games will bring the biggest crowds to the Dean Dome (I think it was 2005 when the whole stadium was packed and broke the record for attendance at a collegiate basketball game). In addition,
if the Heels win, students and fans will "
rush Franklin Street," where those who can (e.g. physically able, not too drunk, etc.) walk to the intersection of Franklin and Columbia in downtown Chapel Hill and just party. Students have been known to tear down trees, climb up poles and steal street signs, start bonfires and jump over them, and
even flip cars. Thanks to the Chapel Hill Police Department, there are no cars flipped, fewer street signs taken, and fewer fires lit (and those that are lit are tiny and extremely manageable).
On the Duke side, they have a much larger student section for the "Cameron Crazies" that stretches along one of the long sides of the court, which definitely adds to the
psychological side of the game. In addition, they've developed a complex, camping-based system to distribute student tickets to the games, effectively creating a phenomenon called "
Krzyzewskiville" (see picture above). This, I believe, happens for all games, and there are rules about how many people can live in one tent, and if the tent must be occupied at all times, etc. I never went to Duke, so I don't know all the rules, but that's the gist of it.
Sorry, that was a long post, guys, but this rivalry is surprisingly huge, especially since it has such history to it. Congrats for reading all the way to here! I'll see you guys again soon!
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