There's just no beating Duke at Cameron, not if your league affiliation doesn't spell A-C-C, and even then, it's a rarity.
Fifth-ranked Duke won on Tuesday night over Michigan State, a 78-69 victory that wasn't pretty but was still plenty effective.
A less-than-100-percent Grayson Allen had 24 points, and even still this squad is still showing little urgency of needing their amazing freshman trio of Harry Giles, Jayson Tatum and Marques Bolden. Signs seem to indicate they'll be returning from their respective injuries soon, but no matter. The Blue Devils are now 7-1 and set up to be a top-five team in the polls for all of December and into early 2017, so long as they can take care of business against Florida next week at Madison Square Garden.
So Tuesday night's Duke win allows me to write about something that I'm not sure I've ever written about. One of the truly ridiculous streaks in sports that refuses to die. It might continue so long as Mike Krzyzewski is still coaching. There's no evidence to suggest otherwise.
We need to reflect on, and talk about, the insanity of Duke's nonconference home winning streak. It's now at 130 games. One-hundred-and-freaking-thirty. I can't quite understand how it's gotten to this point. No team from outside the ACC has won at Cameron in almost 17 years. Five-star players being recruited by Duke now were not born the last time the Blue Devils lost at home to a non-league opponent.
The 130 number is 89 more than the program currently with the second-best home non-con winning streak (Wichita State), which sits at 41 in a row. Dominant programs almost never even hit 50 straight. Jon Scheyer, an assistant on K's staff, was 12 years old the last time Duke was beaten at Cameron by a nonconference opponent.
And even when you account for how many unnecessary buy games Mike Krzyzewski has scheduled over the eras, and there have been too many, it's still ridiculous. Duke's Tuesday night win moved the program to 16-2 all time in the Big Ten/ACC Challenge. A lot of those games have come on Duke's home floor against ranked Big Ten competition. Nine ranked teams, including programs such as Indiana, Ohio State, Georgetown, Wisconsin and Stephen Curry's Davidson's group (twice), have all tried and failed.
And just 16 of the 130 wins over the past 6,123 days have been decided by single digits, the most recent coming on Tuesday night. For nearly 17 years, a Duke win at home over a non-ACC opponent has resulted in a single-digit spread 12 percent of the time. That's almost as absurd as the streak itself.
Nobody can clip the Devils.
The last team to do it? Mike Jarvis' St. John's team all the way back on Feb. 26, 2000, an aberrational, very late out-of-league game. Duke only lost by one point (83-82), and was ranked No. 2 in the country at the time. St. John's wasn't ranked, but the win acted as a slingshot to a No. 2 seed in that year's NCAA Tournament for the Red Storm.
"When somebody asks me about some of the most significant accomplishments of my life, I point to that game," former St. John's coach Mike Jarvis told longtime college hoops scribe Mike Lopresti in 2014.
The Johnnies. A program that lost at home to pitiable Delaware State (and what's that about?) on Tuesday night -- that's the last non-ACC college hoops franchise to get K in Cameron.
"We had some huge wins, winning the Big East, winning the NIT championship and cutting down the nets," Jarvis told NCAA.com. "Honestly, that day was probably just as special."
That Duke team had Shane Battier, Jay Williams (he was Jason Williams back then) and Carlos Boozer. St. John's had (ready for these names?) Erick Barkley and Bootsy Thornton, who hit the winning shot with 13 ticks to go.
The streak is obviously the longest in program history -- and one of the longest in college basketball history -- as it's long since outlasted Duke's near-13-year run from February of '83 into December of '95, when the program went 95 in a row against non-con opponents without dropping a home tilt.
Krzyzewski's all-time home win percentage is .888, with a record of 494-62. That's including quality competition within the ACC. Non-conference win percentage at home for K, all time? I couldn't find the exact numbers, but it's got to be north of 98 percent. The NCAA.com article linked above cites merely three home non-con losses for Duke between 1983 to present day. Phenomenal. This column of dominance is the most underrated aspect to Krzyzewski's mammoth coaching legacy. Even if you account for all the cupcakes, you still occasionally should slip up, and it just doesn't happen. Duke is nearly unbeatable in that building.
And guess what -- this streak is going to live on well into 2017. Because Maine and Tennessee State, the only non-conference opponents remaining on Duke's home schedule this season? Yeah, they're not walking out of Cameron Indoor as victors. The streak's going to grow to 132, gestate for another 10 months, and then likely continue through all of next season.
Most of the folks who love to hate Duke enjoy the Blue Devils most when they watch them lose in the NCAA Tournament. But that happens almost every year. Seeing Duke fall at home to any team is rare enough. Dropping a home game to a non-conference team has become college basketball's version of Halley's Comet, only there's no promise we'll see it again before Coach K decides to retire.
