North Carolina reloads, but catching Duke won't be easy

Published Jul. 22, 2010 5:48 p.m. ET

foxsports

While Duke was hoisting a national championship trophy a few months back, North Carolina's Roy Williams was busy mapping his team's route back to the promised land. Just a season before, he was the one holding the championship hardware.

But months before a forgettable 2009-10 season would end with a NIT finals loss to Dayton, Williams had already taken the first step in getting his team right back up the mountain. That came with the signing of Harrison Barnes, the small forward almost universally considered to be the nation's top ranked recruit.

If Barnes played football, Beano Cook would be predicting he’d win three Heisman Trophies. If he played baseball, Stephen Strasburg would suddenly be Oates to his Hall. And if Barnes played soccer…well, nobody would really notice the guy.

The point is, Barnes has emerged out of Ames, IA as college basketball's next instant superstar, he’s got an upside so big that you could chisel presidents’ faces into it. It’s not IF he’ll pull North Carolina out of the land of NIT doldrums and into the NCAA Tournament, it’s how far into March Madness he’ll carry them.

Barnes is so good that North Carolina fans are forgetting just how dangerously thin their team is in the frontcourt. And that the roster still doesn’t feature a point guard who’ll make anyone forget Ty Lawson anytime soon.

But who knows, maybe the kid might be the kind of rare talent whose stellar play can mask the deficiencies around him. Think Danny and the Miracles back in ‘88 or David Robinson and any Navy team he played on.

He's definitely showing the kind of swagger that a future (make that 2011) #1 pick in the draft needs to have. He strolled into the S.J.G. Greater North Carolina Pro Am last week wearing a Nike t-shirt that read, “I’m That Dude.” BLESSED.

El Dude-erino (or the Dude-er, whichever you prefer) then went out and scored a game high 32 points to lead Team Stackhouse to a 4-point win over a squad featuring NC State’s N.C. State’s Jordan Vandenberg and Scott Wood. DOUBLY BLESSED.

With him in the Tar Heel lineup, maybe 32-point losses to Duke like the one that closed this past regular season will be a thing of the past.

However, it's no cosmic certainty that the addition of Barnes can help North Carolina knock Duke off the mountaintop. That's because Mike Krzyzewski returns not only a ton of talent off his national championship team, but he's also added his own instant impact recruit.

In Kyrie Irving, Coach K has a new point guard whose name appeared just under that of Barnes in every set of recruiting rankings you could find. If Barnes is a certain top pick in 2011, then Irving won't wait very long after that to hear his own name called.

Irving cut his teeth under the tutelage of New Jersey AAU coaching legend Sandy Pyonin. Former Duke greats Bobby Hurley and Jason Williams were also coached by Pyonin, but that didn't necessarily mean Irving's choice of school was a foregone conclusion.

Texas A&M assistant coach Scott Spinelli played basketball with Irving's father at Boston University and led a hard charge by the Aggies. Meanwhile, Kentucky assistant Rod Strickland was a close friend of the Irving family and led an equally hard charge by the Wildcats. In the end, though, the lure of Duke was too much for the nation's best prep point guard to turn down.

And so two future NBA millionaires have come from different parts of the country and ended up roughly 15 miles from each other. They're the highest profile newcomers to America's most heated hoops rivalry, one in which Duke currently holds the upper hand.

The "anything you can do, I can do better" interplay between the nation's top two programs is fascinating stuff to behold. North Carolina wins the 2009 title, so Duke counters by winning it in 2010. Coach K inks Irving, and then the following month Williams signs Barnes.

Right now, it's good to be North Carolina, but it's absolutely fantastic to be Duke. The Blue Devils are an odds on favorite to capture what would be the second set of back-to-back titles in Coach K's career. But in this game of college hoops one upsmanship, the other team in this rivalry can rarely be counted out.