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Next Up - Virginia

Since we won't be able to fully update until sometime Wednesday morning, here is a brief bit on the Virginia game.

Next up for Duke is Virginia, and while Duke won in Durham without too much trouble, Tony Bennett's teams have managed to bother Duke since he showed up in Charlottesville.

Essentially, the template is this: Virginia uses the pack-line defense pioneered by Bennett's father Dick, and somewhat like Princeton, they force opponents to slow down and when they do, they tend to rush to compensate.

This is what happened in Greensboro last year, although Duke overcame it in the end.

This year, with a massive Duke advantage inside and also experience wise, Virginia's best hope is going to be to slow the game down and hope they can again force Duke to use a frantic pace against Virginia's more deliberate one.

Can it work? Of course it can, as the Princeton offense has proved over the years.  Will it? Without Mike Scott and with Will Sherrill playing hurt, they're putting a lot onto the thin shoulder of Assane Sene.  After him, the team gets smaller very quickly. That can be a double-edged sword of course, but Duke's smaller players are pretty good too.