Manny Diaz fights back against 'Duke tiebreaker rule'
· Yahoo Sports
As one of the last coaches to appear during ACC Media Days last week, Manny Diaz had already heard what many had said about Duke’s ACC title last season and saw where a new tiebreaker was implemented that would have kept the Blue Devils out of the championship game last season.
The third-year Duke head coach wasn’t having any of it.
Visit newsbetting.cv for more information.
“Been quite a week, huh?’ Diaz started. “I heard we made the news. I heard we got a rule named after us. That's pretty cool, right? The Duke tiebreaker rule.”
And then the head coach went scorched earth on the change.
“You hear that word that now there will be more deserved teams in the championship game,” Diaz said. “I want to push back against that narrative. I think it's not just false, I think it's insulting. What we're in is we're in a competition. That's what this is. Seventeen teams showed up here this weekend to compete for one championship. The most simple way to do that is if we could all play each other, right, but we can't do that. There's too many damn teams, right? It would be great to have head-to-head, but there are so many teams. It's hard to get us all together head-to-head. It would be cool to have common opponents, but it's hard to have enough common opponents.”
The Blue Devils beat Virginia in the ACC Championship Game last December in overtime while Miami, who would go on to the national title game, sat at home as Duke won a tiebreaker over the Hurricanes, Pittsburgh, SMU and Georgia Tech, who all had 6-2 ACC records, to play in the conference championship game.
“The one thing you can do is you can add up all the wins and losses and add up all the wins and losses of the eight teams that you played against or the nine teams this year,” Diaz said. “By that metric, which is the most objective metric that you can possibly have, there's no feelings or emotions involved in that, we were the top team to go play Virginia in that game.”
This article originally appeared on Duke Wire: Manny Diaz fights back against 'Duke tiebreaker rule'