That hurt.

No, I understate things. That hurt a lot. Indescribably so. It will scar me, and I was just innocently watching from the comfort of my couch. I can't imagine what the anguish is for those who actually played. UNC did everything right for most of the game. They fell behind early to a barrage of scoring from Austin Rivers, but switched the defense up, putting Reggie Bullock on him instead of Harrison Barnes, and then clawed their way back. Duke was completely shut down for the last five minutes of the first half, and the Heels extended that into the second. Within a few minutes, UNC was up by ten and in complete control.

And then things just... stagnated. UNC didn't play particularly poorly, and Duke didn't play particularly well, but the lead just kind of stuck around ten. Tyler Zeller went out with four fouls, but the offense didn't really sputter; Harrison Barnes, after a frustrating first half kicked it into high gear and... the lead remained around ten. Rivers got a second wind, and the lead remained around ten.

Then the last three minutes happened.

Duke was still doing everything wrong at this point. They give it to Kelly for a three, but he's exhausted; it doesn't even reach the rim. But John Henson is deemed to have blocked it, and it's Duke ball. Tyler Thornton (!) makes a three. UNC timeout, seven point game Mason Plumlee gets a steal at half court on the next possession and the ball finds its way to a traveling Seth Curry. Another three, and it's a four point game. Harrison Barnes drives on the other end, stumbles after contact with Thornton, and is whistled with the charge.

Duke again elects to give Ryan Kelly another three-point attempt. He misses, of course. But the rebound finds its way back to Kelly, and even he can hit a baseline jumper. Suddenly, it's 82-80. Mason Plumlee immediately fouls Tyler Zeller. Zeller makes one of two free throws. 83-80.

Duke decides to give Ryan Kelly a third crack at a three pointer. It is again, way, way off. But in going for the rebound, Tyler Zeller tips it into the basket. All of basketball is confused, and it's a one-point game. But Tyler Zeller is fouled immediately. Tyler Zeller is a 79% free throw shooter. Tyler Zeller has already missed three of his nine free throws tonight. The team as a whole has missed 8 of 24, many of them front ends of one-and-ones. Tyler Zeller only makes one of his last two.

But it's a two point game, and Duke is bringing the ball up. Duke hasn't really done much to move the ball around. The only have eight assists on the entire night. And the defense is strong. The Blue Devils can't get near the three-point line. They're forced to call a timeout.

Out of the timeout, Duke still has nothing. Dawkins isn't open. Curry isn't open. Rivers gets a half-hearted screen from Mason Plumlee... and Reggie Bullock doesn't go through it. Bullock is now defending Plumlee, who's gotten maybe one entry pass all evening, and not from Rivers, who won't give it up unless forced. Rivers is being guarded by Zeller. Rivers doesn't make a move. Rivers doesn't look to pass. Rivers jacks up a three over a seven-footer from a step or two behind the arc.

And the fucking thing goes in.

It's a horrible, freakish, epic collapse. We're all sentenced to see it replayed for the rest of our lives, during every Carolina game. It obliterates what had been a very good game for Carolina, played at the head-whipping tempo they like. Kendall Marshall's terrific game – man is it fun to drive into a lane filled with Plumlees – with its 14 points and 8 assists is moot. Barnes' terrific second half, where after being held almost scoreless in the first he would finish with 25 points, is wiped away. Double-doubles from both Zeller and Henson are forgotten. Because of those last few minutes.

It didn't register as a collapse at the time. It was nothing like, say, Georgetown in 2007, which haunts me to this day. It was a death by a thousand cuts, a steady trickle of missed free throws and plays unfinished. The anger is just now setting in as I type, a good half-hour after the game. This whole thing is a travesty.

My one hope is the knowledge that the players have to be hurt infinitely more by this. That it has to just eat at them. The Florida State loss was an embarrassment, but shame can only motivate you so much. To lose like this, at home, in so painful a manner, to watch Austin Rivers run down the court celebrating, only to realize he was running away from the only group of people out of 20,000 who didn't want to punch him in the throat – that hurts. That festers. That is the kind of loss that burns the resolve to never lose again into a team. This is the sort of thing that forges a team, and spurs them on to leave destruction in their wake the rest of the way.

Or so I hope. Because I can't take any more losses like this.

Time to demonstrate to Duke their inferiority again. The game is on all the channels, 9 pm.

Duke makes shots. Plain and simple.

The Blue Devils have the fifth most efficient offense in the country, while UNC has the 17th, a difference of 6.7 points per 100 possessions, according to Ken Pomeroy's stats. In ACC play, that margin is even wider. But the two teams go about getting their points in very different ways, and it all begins with Duke's field goal percentage.

Barring the occasional year when Duke has a strong player at center, the Blue Devils typical rely on perimeter shooting, and this year is no exception. Only Boston College attempts more threes than Duke, and the Eagles don't find the bottom of the net nearly as often. So it's no surprise that the most shots are taken by two pure guards, Austin Rivers and Seth Curry, followed by 6'11 Ryan Kelly, who still takes a third of his shots from behind the arc.

Curry is a known quantity at this point. In his two games last season against the Heels, he scored over twenty points in each. He takes an equal number of shots from two and from three, but against Carolina he's more likely to rely on the latter; in Duke's loss in Chapel Hill last season he was the only Blue Devil to sink a three. He had six.

That game in Chapel Hill augers well for the Heels. Their perimeter defense was strong, and of Duke's 67 points, 50 came from two players, Curry and Nolan Smith. Smith's 30 points have graduated, and Austin Rivers hasn't been able to replace him. Not for a lack of trying, as Rivers takes more shots and scores more points than anyone else on the team, but he's been incredibly streaky. He's been benched more than once, had games where he's been a non factor, like Georgia Tech and Clemson, his first two ACC road games. He has the worst effective field goal percentage of any of the Duke starters, although not by much, and will be the easiest to force out of his rhythm. He may be halfway there already, expecting to defended by Harrison Barnes when it's more likely he'll see Bullock's hand in his face.

And this brings us to Ryan Kelly. Kelly is tasked with replacing Kyle Singler as the big man who spends surprisingly little time in the paint. Instead Kelly is more often using his size on the perimeter, drawing out a defender to an uncomfortable position and either draining the three or driving to the hoop. Unfortunately for him, UNC's big men are quite comfortable outside, and John Henson's wingspan can be a game-changer. Playing alongside Singler last season, Kelly was a non-factor in his two games against UNC, scoring 2 and 4 points. He's improved as he's been thrust into a more prominent role, but I still expect him to struggle.

Surprisingly, the best shooter on the team at the moment is Mason Plumlee, middle child of the Plumlee clan. He too has had no success in past games against the Heels, but this year he's emerged as the team's best rebounder and the player with the highest effective field goal percentage. He does get a lot of his points off those offensive boards though, which may make for slow going against Tyler Zeller. Plumlee's older brother has watched his minutes decline this year, but I expect him to get a lot of time tonight as Krzyzewski throws bodies at the UNC interior. We might also see more of freshman Michael Gbinije, who although smaller than the Plumlees could present interesting matchup problems for the Heels.

The player I do expect to have a big night, besides Curry, is Andre Dawkins. He too has been streaky, and also has had little success against UNC, but can have big nights when the bigger names are drawing all the defensive focus. He's more of a three-point shooter than his fellow guards, but also picks his shots a bit more carefully than Rivers does.

The big unknown in all of this is exactly what type of lineup Krzyzewski will go with for the majority of the game. He may try to go big to try to slow down UNC's offense at the expense of his own shooters; he may prefer to go small and swarm the perimeter, denying entry passes and taking his own chances with Duke's perimeter shooting strength. It's almost guaranteed the Blue Devils will slow the pace down, although if their smart they'll challenge the offensive boards more than a lot of recent teams – State especially – have attempted. Duke will need second chances at the rim to score enough to keep the Heels at bay, but I'm not sure it will be enough. In their last two games against Carolina, only Seth Curry among the current roster had any success against the Heels. While there's been some improvement, and Austin Rivers is a big unknown, I don't see this team having the talent and maturity to keep up with UNC.

Carolina wins by ten.

Mike Krzyzewski's Blue Devils have lost two of their last three games at home, and he's not happy:

"The last two years, we haven't lost that many, but those teams were very mature," Krzyzewski said Monday on the David Glenn Show. "With Scheyer and Singler and Smith and Lance and Brian, we had older, very dependable guys. You knew what to expect. This year's team is a team that doesn't have those guys.

"One of the best ways of communication is if someone on your team is communicating your message. That's what Singler did on a daily basis through his effort or Nolan Smith through his effort and talk. Or Scheyer, Lance and Brian. They did that as big brothers. That's something we're missing on this team. Not being negative about our team, but we just do not have that. As a result, the message you're trying to get across may not be getting as deep as it needs to be."

As a Carolina fan, I feel compelled to point out that Krzyzewski's entire schtick is that he's a leader who happens to coach basketball and he's built an entire industry around it. So to blame his current woes on a lack of leadership from the team is a little risible. He has four juniors playing over half the game; if a team leader hasn't emerged, isn't that the fault of the guy who teaches leadership for a very lucrative living?

But why leadership problems may be a catch-all for Duke's current woes, I'm more interested in how they're manifesting on the court. Because one thing Krzyzewski does have going for him is an extreme adaptability to the players he has on the floor. When Roy Williams' 2010 team couldn't handle the fast-paced offense like teams in years past with Larry Drew at the point, he ran it anyway. (And in his defense, there's no evidence that team could run a slow, half court set either.) Krzyzewski, on the other hand, had 73.9 possessions per game in 2006, but 67.3 the very next year; he'll run at whatever pace he deems appropriate. He abandoned interior play altogether when he didn't have the players for it, and won a championship with the most unorthodox use of a center I've ever seen. He recruited 6'8" Kyle Singler and then let him hang out on the perimeter on offense all the time.

But there are a few constants, and one of them is defense. Going back to 2009, Duke hasn't allowed more than a point per possession in ACC play. Currently they give up 1.04. Their turnover generation the past two season is also the lowest it has been in that time frame, and their steals considerably. Opponents have always been a little leery of taking threes against Duke's swarming perimeter defense, but this season they're taking more than they did since Elton Brand patrolled the Cameron paint. And the current motley collection of Plumlees are no Elton Brand.

(Selected Duke defensive stats. From left, possessions per 40 minutes, opponent's points per possession, opponent's effective field goal percentage, defensive rebounding percentage, turnovers forced per possession, opponent's three point attempts per shot, opponent's three point percentage, and steals per possession.)

Frankly, the Duke defense hasn't been as fearsome as in previous years, especially on the perimeter. And when an opponent can combine decent perimeter shooting with an athletic big man, it's been trouble for the Blue Devils. Jared Sullinger, Reggie Johnson, and Xavier Gibson all had field days against the Duke interior, and both Miami and Tempe shot 50% from behind the arc, unheard of against most Duke teams.

So I'd look less to leadership issues and more to defensive ones. Particularly Austin Rivers and Andre Dawkins, who are generating very few of the steals that Duke so often relies on. The Plumlees and Ryan Kelly are doing a little better inside, but rely on their height a lot. Stronger or more athletic big men can cause havoc, and I expect Tyler Zeller and John Henson to do just that. And all the leadership in Krzyzewski's little head isn't going to fix that.

This being the week of the Carolina-Duke game, I'm expected to direct a fair amount of hate Durham's way. And I don't aim to disappoint. But it doesn't have to be all vehemence; I'm a gracious man. So let me kick off the week with the nicest thing I'll say about the Cameron Crazies: They're not complete idiots.

A few years ago, Duke professor Dan Ariely ran an economics experiment on the Cameron Crazies. It's become rather famous, being retold in Ariely's book Predictably Irrational, Moskowitz's and Wertheim's Scorecasting, and numerous places on the web. It's also usually told wrong, so I'll turn it over to Ariely himself:

As Ziv Carmon (a professor at INSEAD) and I listened to the air horn during the campout at Duke in the spring of 1994, we were intrigued by the real-life experiment going on before our eyes. All the students who were camping out wanted passionately to go to the basketball game. They had all camped out for a long time for the privilege. But when the lottery was over, some of them would become ticket owners, while others would not.

The question was this: would the students who had won tickets – who had ownership of tickets – value those tickets more than the students who had not won them even though they all "worked" equally hard to obtain them? On the basis of Jack Knetsch, Dick Thaler, and Daniel Kahneman's research on the "endowment effect," we predicted that when we own something – whether it's a car or a violin, a cat or a basketball ticket – we begin to value it more than other people do.

[...]

That night we got a list of the students who had won the [ticket] lottery and those who hadn't, and we started telephoning. Our first call was to William, a senior majoring in chemistry. William was rather busy. After camping for the previous week, he had a lot of homework and e-mail to catch up on. He was not too happy, either, because after reaching the front of the line, he was still not one of the lucky ones who had won a ticket in the lottery.

"Hi, William," I said. "I understand you didn't get one of the tickets for the final four (sic)."

[...]

William and Joseph were just two of more than 100 students whom we called. In general, the students who did not own a ticket were willing to pay about $170 for one. The price they were willing to pay, as in William' case, was tempered by alternative uses for the money (such as spending it in a sports bar for drinks and food.) Those who owned a ticket, on the other hand, demanded about $2,400 for it. Like Joseph, they justified their price in terms of the importance of the experience and the lifelong memories it would create.

What was really surprising, though, was that in all our phone calls, not a single person was willing to sell a ticket at a price that someone else was willing to pay. What did we have? We had a group of students all hungry for a basketball ticket before the lottery drawing; and then, bang – in an instant after the drawing, they were divided into two groups – ticket owners and non–ticket owners. It was an emotional chasm that was formed, between those who now imagined the glory of the game, and those who imagined what else they could buy with the price of the ticket. And it was an empirical chasm as well – the average selling price (about $2,400) was separated by a factor of about 14 from the average buyer's offer (about $175).

From a rational persective, both the ticket holders and the non–ticket holders should have thought of the game in exactly the same way. After all, the anticipated atmosphere at the game and the enjoyment one could expect from the experience should not depend on winning the lottery. Then how could a random lottery drawing have changed the students' view of the game – and the value of the tickets – so dramatically?

Ah, those silly, irrational Duke students. They can't even get a market to clear! We should take them all around back and have them shot.

Except they're really not being irrational. Did you catch the key part of the experiment? The Final Four. This is the part most overlooked in retellings of the experiment, which just assumes the games are in Cameron. But the fact that it's the Final Four explains the true difference in buyer and seller values – we're looking at two different markets.

(Keep in mind, this analysis assumes the description in Ariely's book is accurate; the paper it comes from (PDF) makes it sound like this was just a phone survey the Friday before the FInal Four, where no students queried actually had tickets.)

Those looking to buy tickets were competing for the 23,674 seats in Charlotte Coliseum in 1994 (give or take). Surprisingly few of them would go to Duke students. Assuming the number was similar to that UNC would distribute three years later, I'd put it around 500 or so. Instead, the majority of the tickets are distributed to coaches and the general public; people, who if they're smart don't really have a strong desire to see Duke cut down the nets. Often, you can get tickets for the game outside the stadium or through brokers for twice or so the face value – not to far removed from the bids students were offering.

The students selling tickets however, basically have two people bidding for their seat – the guy on the phone, presumably also a guy rooting for the Blue Devils, and their own inner Duke fan. The inner Duke fan is going to win that auction every time. But it doesn't mean he's putting an irrational value on the ticket.

How do I know? Well, think about what happens when your team loses in the semifinals. Lots of fans of the losing team cut their losses and sell their tickets – I did in 1997 in Indianapolis. I knew what a fan of a team in the NCAA finals values a ticket at, because I valued it at exactly that price a mere five minutes earlier, before Arizona ended UNC's hopes. And yet I sold at a price much closer to what those ticketless Duke students were bidding. The market cleared.

This isn't to say the effect doesn't exist; many other studies have shown it, just on a smaller scale. Just this particular example of it is a pretty poor one. If anything, it's an example of how the initial price a god is fixed at influences its later prices; NCAA tickets are always underpriced relative to the secondary market, and those who miss out on the initial offering are loath to pay too much more when given the chance. But as amusing as it is to see the Cameron Crazies immortalized as irrational consumers, it's still a bad example, demonstrated on bad people.

Later this week: Less economics and more basketball!