DURHAM, N.C. — Duke had just played with its best start-to-finish level of competitive fight in an opening month gone awry, only to end up with another loss to a top-flight opponent in No. 5 LSU.
Senior guard Ashlon Jackson was clinging to the idea that the struggles could pay off in the long term.
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“We’re in the mud right now,” Jackson said softly.
She might as well have been talking for the entire Atlantic Coast Conference in women’s basketball.
The preseason ACC favorite Blue Devils are 3-6. The league has no top-10 teams in the AP Top 25 poll in a season for the first time in nearly a quarter-century. And it wrapped up a 13-3 loss in the ACC/SEC Challenge on Thursday night, including all three matchups involving its ranked teams in No. 11 North Carolina, No. 18 Notre Dame and No. 22 Louisville.
Of that trio, the Cardinals nearly upset No. 3 South Carolina, losing 79-77 at home.
“I know we have good players in our leagues, we have good teams,” Duke coach Kara Lawson said after Thursday night’s 93-77 loss to LSU. “For (Duke), we haven’t had the start that we’ve wanted. It’s our job to change it.”
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Unexpected start
This isn’t the position anyone expected for the ACC, which had a different team reach the Final Four in 2022, 2023 and 2024 while the Blue Devils reached last year’s NCAA Elite Eight after winning their first ACC Tournament title since 2013. The league opened this year with five AP Top 25 teams, headlined by the North Carolina-based “Triangle” schools of Duke at No. 7, N.C. State at No. 9 and UNC at No. 11.
And the ACC had fielded at least one top-10 team in every AP Top 25 poll dating to December 2001, a run of 453 consecutive polls.
Yet that streak streak ended by mid-November, leaving the Tar Heels — who lost 79-64 at No. 2 Texas on Thursday night — as the league’s highest-ranked team for three straight weeks from outside the top 10.
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The Blue Devils opened with a loss to Baylor in Paris, followed shortly after by a loss to West Virginia in which the Mountaineers finished with just five players due to numerous ejections to knock the Blue Devils out of the AP poll. The Wolfpack, who lost Wednesday in overtime at No. 9 Oklahoma, fell out this week in a season that included a home loss to unranked Rhode Island.
“I feel like we’re a better team than people think, I feel like our league’s better,” UNC coach Courtney Banghart said before the Texas game. “You could say, ‘Well there’s a couple of results that don’t show that.’ … I always say: `Let’s see when it’s all said and done, who’s advanced (in the NCAAs), how many teams did you send to each round, and what that looks like.’
“As someone who has lived in the ACC now with these coaches and players, we’ll be just fine. The league will be just fine.”
Maybe so. But the trajectory of the annual SEC tussle is heading in the wrong direction: from the teams splitting 14 games in 2023 to the SEC winning 10-6 last year and now this year.
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“13-3 SEC? I’m glad we’re one of the 13,” LSU coach Kim Mulkey said about the Duke win, adding later: “We didn’t have to have an ACC Challenge to figure out how tough our league is.”
Duke’s challenges
The Blue Devils’ plight in Durham has stood out in particular among the ACC’s opening-month hiccups.
They entered having lost three straight games, the past two coming in blowouts to No. 3 South Carolina and No. 4 UCLA. And they faced the unenviable test of slowing LSU’s offense, which had scored 100+ points in each of its first eight games to set an NCAA record.
Duke started the game on a 14-1 run as LSU sputtered, only to see the Tigers began to kick into gear once they stopped committing turnovers. A 31-point second quarter helped push LSU into control, with LSU shooting 59.7% for the game, leading by 21 points and vocally celebrating through the final minutes on the Blue Devils’ Cameron Indoor Stadium homecourt.
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Now Duke heads to Virginia Tech on Sunday to open league play, a first step toward getting its season back on course.
“I think we can grow into a really good team,” Lawson said. “That’s what we’re focused on doing. I haven’t watched the other ACC teams to be able to tell you, but I would venture to say that a lot of them can grow into really good teams, too.”
