Roy Williams on Duke Rematch: "They Know What Happened"

Coach doesn't have to tell his players anything

Roy Williams said that he doesn’t have to do anything special to prepare his team for the rivalry games against Duke.

“I probably do fewer things to try to get them ready to play Duke than anybody else we play,” Williams said, “because everybody else makes it so I don’t have to.”

All the coverage and fan interest lets the players know what’s at stake, so Williams doesn’t have much to add.

“Before we played last time, you saw every game since Adam and Eve,” he said. “They had every game on TV.”

Still, there’s a difference between the first Duke-Carolina meeting—won this year by the Blue Devils in overtime—and the rematch.

“Second game, you always try to make amends whether you win or lose,” he said. “One team always loses, so they try to do a better job in the second game, but I think our goal would be to try to play as well as we can play and see what happens over there. That’s basically the way that I’m looking at it.”

Williams doesn’t plan to harp on the first game, won by Duke on two buzzer beaters, however.

“We’re not going to get the tape out from the last game and say, ‘Watch what we didn’t do here. Look how lucky they were. Watch what you could have done here. Look how silly this was.’ We’re not going to do that. We’re going to pick out 20 plays, 25 plays. I would guess 10 of them will be from our game. The other 15 would be from the other games Duke has played. We’ll show them the clips in the scouting report and then move on. They know what happened last game. I don’t have to tell them. I would hope it would be that kind of game again, where we have a chance to win at the end. For the most part, our games against them have been good basketball games, really competitive basketball games.”

Not always, though.

“I remember in 2010, they beat us by 30 the last game over there,” he said. “I left that night and drove to Wilmington. I went for a walk seven times during the day, and killed one of my buddies. He said, ‘I’m tired.’ I just couldn’t stand to stick around. These guys came out at Wrightsville Beach and said, ‘Coach, God, you got killed!’ I said, ‘You don’t think I know that?’”