North Carolina Hoping for 'Anything Can Happen' Miracle with Duke Coming to Town

Whether you believe Duke vs. North Carolina is the greatest rivalry in any sport or merely a top-five hate-fest in men's college basketball, there's no denying that it is a bucket list-worthy event and a must-watch affair at least twice every season.

When the Tobacco Road titans tangle at the Dean E. Smith Center at 6 p.m. ET Saturday night, it will be the 39th consecutive time the Tar Heels play host with one of the two teams ranked in the AP Top 10.

This is likely neither the first nor the last time you'll see this stat nugget, but in the past 100 meetings dating back to January 1979, each team has won 50 times, and each team has scored exactly 7,746 points.

Yet it feels like the seventh-ranked Blue Devils are going to blow out the 12-loss Tar Heels, doesn't it?

Duke is tied with Kansas for the best odds at winning the 2020 NCAA tournament with Caesars Palace (both blue bloods are currently listed at 7-1). According to the Bracket Matrix, the Blue Devils are the top No. 2 seed right now, patiently waiting to ascend to the top line if Baylor, Kansas, Gonzaga or San Diego State ever provides that opening.

And North Carolina...is a train wreck.

The Tar Heels have lost 11 of their past 15 games. That includes an embarrassing home loss to Boston College last Saturday in what was supposed to be Cole Anthony's triumphant return to action. In the subsequent loss to Florida State, the Tar Heels missed 17 consecutive field-goal attempts, going 10 minutes and 59 seconds between made buckets.

Unless they mess around and win the ACC tournament, there's no realistic hope for this sub-.500 team to receive an invite to the Big Dance.

But we all know what ESPN's College GameDay crew is going to say at least half a dozen times while broadcasting from Chapel Hill on Saturday morning:

"Throw out the records when these loathed rivals square off!"

Has anyone ever bothered to fact-check that off-the-cuff remark, though?

Well, I did, and it's a load of hooey.

Streeter Lecka/Getty Images

Turns out the records are a solid indicator of what to expect, even when the better team is the one that has to travel the short distance along U.S. 15-501.

Since the inception of the AP poll in 1948, there have been 26 instances in which the road team in this rivalry was ranked in the Top 10 and the home team was unranked. The road team won 19 of those games (73.1 percent) and 12 of them by at least an eight-point margin.

To put that number into national context, through Tuesday morning, there had been 800 cases dating back to the start of the 2010-11 season in which an AP Top 10 team played a true road game against an unranked opponent, per Sports Reference. In those games, the ranked team has a record of 582-218, otherwise read as 72.8 percent.

And we're not even talking conference games or rivals with deep-rooted hatred for one another. That's any Top 10 team at any unranked team. It includes North Carolina's 112-70 win at Chaminade in the 2012 Maui Invitational, as well as Duke's 108-62 win at UNC Greensboro in December 2010.

If I were to whittle that list down to just the conference games and the ones regarded as top nonconference rivalries, it's probably more like 63 percent.

Saying anything can happen in this rivalry is simply acknowledging that it is, in fact, a college basketball game. It's actually a bit less random than what we've seen on a nightly basis for the past decade.

Let's go one step further than that, though, because North Carolina isn't just unranked; it is well on its way toward its second-worst season of the past century.

Things aren't quite as dire as they were when UNC went 8-20 in 2001-02, but that was the only season since 1920 in which the Tar Heels won fewer than 44.4 percent of their games played. They are currently at 45.5 percent, and KenPom.com has them projected to finish the regular season at 13-18 (41.9 percent).

So what does it look like when the home team is having a particularly bad season?

Just to draw the line somewhere, let's call anything below 64 percent a bad season by Duke/UNC standards—and let's also safely assume the Tar Heels aren't going to reach that mark this year. Even if North Carolina miraculously flipped a switch and didn't lose again for the next two months, its absolute best-case scenario is a 29-12 record (70.7 percent). And that's not happening.

Dating back to 1950, there have been 29 instances of either Duke or North Carolina having a "bad season" while the other won better than 64 percent of its games. That means 29 cases of a good road team facing a bad home team in this rivalry. The road team has gone 23-6 (79.3 percent) in those contests.

Sure, there have been a few stunners.

Duke went 15-13 in 1968-69, but one of those wins was a home game against No. 2 North Carolina. Similar story three years later when Duke went 14-12 with a home win over No. 3 North Carolina. And in 1980-81, the Tar Heels were ranked 11th when they lost in overtime at Duke in Mike Krzyzewski's first season with the Blue Devils. (In all three seasons, UNC still made it to the Final Four.)

On the other side of things, Duke was ranked fifth, eighth and 10th in 1965, 1990 and 2003, respectively, when it lost a road game during a down year for the Tar Heels. The most inexplicable was the 19-point loss in 1990, but those Blue Devils did recover to reach the national championship.

BOB JORDAN/Associated Press

But six out of 29 times is hardly grounds for believing we should throw caution to the wind and disregard everything that has transpired prior to each installment of this game. If anything, expect Duke to win a blowout because the favorite won by double digits in 10 of those 29 games.

So if you're picking the Tar Heels to win (or to cover the double-digit spread), don't do it "because anything can happen in this rivalry," or because they have played to a stalemate over the course of the past four decades. That's silly.

However, you might consider doing it because Duke has struggled from three-point range during the first two legs of this three-game streak of road games.

The Blue Devils did score a million 97 points in the win at Syracuse, but they only made six threes against the 2-3 zone. And in Tuesday night's unexpected close call at Boston College, they started out 0-of-14 before Joey Baker finally made the team's last three-point attempt of the night.

As anemic as North Carolina's offense has been throughout this season—70.9 points per game with only three games over 78; quite the drop off from 85.8 and 26, respectively, last year—Duke is going to be in trouble if that deep ball isn't falling.

While Duke is nowhere near as reliant on threes as it often has been for the past few decades, Vernon Carey Jr. is the only true post presence on the roster. And he has committed four fouls in four of Duke's past six games. Carolina's trio of Armando Bacot, Garrison Brooks and Leaky Black will make it difficult for Duke's guards to create in the paint, and you better believe they'll be trying to send Carey to the bench with early foul trouble.

The young Blue Devils have obviously grown a lot since the season opener against Kansas, but it bears mentioning that they were 15-of-40 (37.5 percent) on two-point attempts in that game while trying to navigate around or over Udoka Azubuike and David McCormack. Georgetown's Omer Yurtseven also gave the Blue Devils fits in a game where they shot 40.4 percent inside the arc and had 12 shots blocked.

That said, Duke still won both of those games, and I fully expect Duke to win this one.

It's not because the Blue Devils are unbeatable, but because the Tar Heels are astoundingly beatable. They are one of the worst shooting teams in the country, and their best shooter (Brandon Robinson) is questionable with an ankle injury that caused him to miss the Florida State game.

Anthony scored 26 on 14 field-goal attempts last weekend, and North Carolina still lost to Boston College. He would probably need to put up 40 for the Tar Heels to have a fighting chance. Considering no individual has registered more than 27 in a game against Duke's defense yet this season, best of luck to him on that quest.

Prediction: Duke 76, North Carolina 61

Kerry Miller covers men's college basketball and college football for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter, @kerrancejames.