Clash of styles between Duke and Texas Tech is a college basketball class struggle
There are some familiar names on the Golden State Warriors championship banners that hang over the practice court at the Chase Center, some old — Jeff Mullins! —and some more recent, like Quinn Cook and James Michael McAdoo.
There’s another name on all three of the newest banners that was very nearly familiar: Shaun Livingston, one of the top players in the high school class of 2004, committed to Duke but never showed up on campus, back when NBA players could do such a thing.
Livingston was the first Duke player specifically recruited as a likely one-and-done player — Corey Maggette and Luol Deng both unexpectedly turned pro after their freshman years — and the early harbinger of what would become the dominant trend among the powers in college basketball, Duke included, when the NBA closed the early entry door to 18-year-olds.
In the 16 years since the NBA insisted on the one-year NCAA apprenticeship, 19 Duke freshmen have left for the NBA. Another three will join that list this spring. The recruiting revolving door will spin on, even after coach Mike Krzyzewski is imminently gone.
Duke and Kentucky both have national titles using the model that emerged among elites — recruit the best talent annually and figure the rest out — and both have occasionally flamed out. There’s always been a healthy tug and pull between that approach and more traditional recruit-and-develop teams like Virginia and Villanova and North Carolina, all of which have won titles with older teams, still with plenty of NBA-bound talent.
Then came COVID and extended eligibility and the widening of the transfer portal, this new era of free agency and sixth years in college basketball. The real advantage in college basketball may now be age before beauty. Baylor won a national title last year with only one first-round pick on the roster and this Sweet 16 includes some of the oldest teams in the country — Providence, Houston, Texas Tech, Miami.
In 2022, talent is only part of the equation. The current gap in college basketball isn’t necessarily between the haves and have-nots but the old and the young, the seasoned and the naive.
At two ends of the spectrum
Saint Peter’s upset of Kentucky was a product of that dynamic, but nothing could represent the greater dichotomy in college basketball at large than Thursday’s NCAA tournament regional semifinal between Duke and Texas Tech, the five-stars against the no-stars, the one-and-dones against the twenty-somethings, the entitled and the anonymous.
“They weren’t the four- and five-star players, and they have just had to prove game in and game out and every year that they deserve and belong right here,” Texas Tech coach Mark Adams said of his team. “They’ve done that.”
The teams are almost diametric opposites. The high-and-mighty Blue Devils with their famous coach on his fanfare-filled farewell tour, the standard-bearer in college basketball with McDonald’s All-Americans and lottery picks tripping over each other. The rough-and-ready Red Raiders, full of transfers from Oral Roberts and Louisiana and Virginia Commonwealth and Winthrop and elsewhere, some former JUCO players, all who would never have gotten a sniff from Duke in a million years.
“I definitely feel like our team is a testament to just what hard work can get you and how it can pay off for you,” Bryson Williams, a UTEP transfer, said. “All of us guys being in college for so long and having to grind our way up the ranks of college basketball, things like that. And then all of us ending here and being in the Sweet 16.”
Marcus Santos-Silva has been around college basketball so long, he nearly played Duke in the 2019 tournament, if VCU had beaten Central Florida in the first round. The Red Raiders went to the Final Four last year, but there’s no one left from that team. If Wake Forest was the ACC’s Team Built for 2022, Texas Tech is the country’s.
In terms of average age weighted by minutes played, calculated by John Gasaway, Texas Tech is the third-oldest team still playing, older than even Miami. Duke is 16th of 16. The average Duke starter is two years younger than his Texas Tech counterpart.
“Even though they don’t have those five-star guys, they’re still obviously a great team,” Duke’s Mark Williams said. “I mean, they’re in the Sweet 16, so obviously, they’re one of the best teams out (there), but we’re also one of the best teams out as well, so it’s going to be a battle.”
Roots in Bobby Knight’s coaching tree
If there’s any common thread, it’s Bobby Knight: Krzyzewski’s coach at Army and the person who legitimized Texas Tech as a basketball program in 2002 when he was exiled there from Indiana. Knight hired Chris Beard, who later got the Red Raiders to the national title game in 2019, and Beard hired Adams, who got his first job at a 400-student Texas junior college during Krzyzewski’s second season at Duke and has recorded 27 of his 28 career Division I wins this season after taking over for Beard.
Krzyzewski and Adams make quite a pair. One is basketball royalty, the most famous face in college basketball for three decades. The other is a coaching lifer finally getting a chance at the highest level. Krzyzewski invited Adams on his radio show — “It’s not a podcast,” Krzyzewski said — earlier this season. Other than that, the only thing they share is a title.
There’s a lot about this week that feels out of place for Duke, whether it’s flying cross-country to play three time zones away or the fact that Vegas sees Duke as a 1-point underdog against Texas Tech or that Krzyzewski has never won an NCAA tournament game on the West Coast. But its opponent may be most unfamiliar of all, a team not trying to do what Duke does but do something completely different.
“We have one of the youngest teams, if not the youngest team I’ve coached, and you’re trying to build habits,” Krzyzewski said. “When you get transfers, older, and especially established players, they’re already pretty well set in the way they play, and so for him to be able to get all of them to be on the same page is a beautiful thing to watch, especially on the defensive end where they’ve been committed and probably are the best defensive team in the country.”
The only thing their teams have in common is Thursday’s game, a clash of styles, a class struggle with the highest of stakes.
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This story was originally published March 24, 2022 at 5:10 AM.
