Schedule Intel: First Confirmed Opponent

Putting a schedule together is never easy and doing so in the middle of a pandemic is a major challenge. So it’s really no great surprise that the schedule has yet to be officially released even though it’s the middle of October.

We do know one non-conference opponent though: Gardner-Webb out of Boiling Springs, NC, about a three hour bus ride from Cameron will make the trip on November 25th.

We’ll probably see a lot of regional non-conference games, not just from Duke but from most of the Power Five schools. You can’t control everything but you can do a better job when you can limit exposure when traveling and in that regard, buses really have it all over airplanes.

Gardner-Webb was 16-16 last season and you might think that a Big South team couldn’t do any damage in Cameron.

We would remind you of a couple of things.

First, a lot of people said that last year about Stephen F. Austin before they pulled off a huge upset. And second, Duke has always been able to rely on the Cameron Crazies to provide a boost in a tight game. If Gardner-Webb somehow takes Duke down to the wire, Coach K will not be able to turn to the Crazies for help as he so often has before.