So does Duke actually fade down the stretch of a season?

There are precious few things that are considered truths in college hoops.

Those that are tend to be believed universally and without question.

Dick Vitale loves Duke. Doug Gottlieb hates (insert team name here). The three-point line is the great equalizer. Any John Calipari coached-team is in danger of having their season erased.

Alex Faranoff, a writer for The Chronicle, Duke's student newspaper took one of those truths to task yesterday as he attempted to debunk the myth that the Blue Devils fade down the stretch of the season. If you like crunching numbers and tempo free stats, you can get an in depth look at what Faranoff did here, but the simple version is that he took the efficiency differences for all of Duke's ACC games since 2004, and created this scatterplot.

As far as debunking the myth, well, he failed:

As it turns out, Duke does have a tendency to fade down the stretch. The Blue Devils’ efficiency margin dropped, on average, by 0.01 points per possession per game. That doesn’t seem like much, but it adds up. Assuming 67-possession games (the national average), the Blue Devils declined by 13 points relative to their opponents over the course of the 19-game conference season (0.01 x 67 posessions x 19 games = 13 points). January’s double-digit win became March’s nail-biter—or even worse.

Now, the question becomes why.

Is it because Coach K plays his best players too many minutes?

I don't necessarily believe that. These are kids that play at the very most three games a week, which is rare. And even if they played 40 minutes per game, there are eight TV timeouts, a halftime, and countless stoppages and whistles that allow the kids to catch their breath. These kids are finely tuned athletic machines and just 18, 19, 20 years old. They can bounce back pretty quickly from sore legs.

Personally, I think it has been a result of the rosters that Coach K puts together. Duke isn't exactly churning out NBA talent. They are loaded with kids that are very good college players that fit perfectly into the system that Coach K runs.

In other words, Duke is so successful at the start of the season because Coach K figures out the best way to get his best players their best chance to score.

As the season goes on, teams are able to scout the Dukies. They are able to figure out what Duke is trying to do, and game plan for it. Since Duke doesn't that the raw talent that goes through other programs, they end up struggling more than some of the other top programs.

I don't have anywhere near the mathematical capacity to complete this, but I'd love to see this regression done for some of the other top programs in the country.