Yesterday, ESPN’s Jeff Goodman predicted that Kentucky will lose at Kansas during the upcoming season. Goodman said the game will be close but ultimately, the Cats will succumb to the road environment at Allen Fieldhouse.
Dana O’Neil, Goodman’s partner at ESPN, thinks the Wildcats will also lose to the Duke Blue Devils.
Here’s what O’Neil has to say about that game:
Never too early to predict a winner … So: I waffled back and forth on this one since both teams are so similar in the most critical ways. Though Duke lost fewer players than Kentucky body for body, the Blue Devils who opted for the NBA (not to mention the graduation of Quinn Cook) leave just as big of a void as the hole left by the mass Wildcat exodus.
But then again, both teams essentially reloaded, replacing one group of talented freshmen with the next.
So how do you pick a winner?
To me, the great separator is experience. It almost always is in college basketball, especially today when so many teams are sharing the talent pool. In this game, Duke has just a little bit more.
Amile Jefferson, Marshall Plumlee, Matt Jones and Allen all have logged significant playing time for the Blue Devils over the years. Jefferson and Plumlee are actual seniors, not seniors by default or circumstance and Jones is a junior. There is no match for that, especially in the early part of the season when teams are still trying to find their chemistry.
So that’s a long-winded way of saying that the pick here is Duke.
