Duke Hosts Virginia in a High Stakes Battle Fresh Off the Cavs Being Upset by Wake Forest, Last Week.

Duke heads into today’s matchup with Virginia knowing exactly what’s at stake: a de-facto ACC title play-in game that will shape the conference race in the final stretch of the season. The Blue Devils have positioned themselves to control their own fate. 

Duke’s offense under Darian Mensah has been explosive. Just look at last week against UConn where Mensah turned it over three times and the Blue Devils still scored 34 points in a shootout loss at UConn. The real question is going to be Duke's defense.

The Devils are giving up around 29 points per game. With Virginia quarterback, Chandler Morris, listed as probable, that could potentially pose a problem for Duke. The good news for Duke is that the Cavaliers offense has not quite been, over about the last month and change, what it was in the first part of the season.

Over the first six games of the season, Virginia averaged 44.6 points per game. Over the last four games, they've come back down to earth averaging 19.7. Even though Virginia hasn't been as explosive lately as when they started, they have still shown enough of a sample to know that they are capable of going off at any time. 

Virginia was the only remaining undefeated team in ACC play going into last week against Wake Forest, but a slugfest with Jake Dickert's Deacs resulted in their first loss.

We know Duke is going to score points and likely a lot of them. If the Blue Devils hope to give the Hoos their second straight ACC loss and likely punch their ticket to the ACC title game, the key is showing some kind of resistance on defense. 

One of the themes of Duke's season has been not being able to get it done in big stage, signature games. You can point to games like Darian Mensah's return to Tulane or against both ranked (at the time) Illinois and Georgia Tech. The common theme in all of them was making costly careless mistakes over the course of the game.

Duke finally rid of that trend in their 46-45 win over Clemson in Death Valley.

Today is their biggest stage yet with a trip to Charlotte on the line. It's at home for the Devils and you're catching the Cavs at a vulnerable moment. Duke will look to capitalize on it at 3:30, this afternoon.