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Duke and Notre Dame: New ACC basketball rivals?

Mike Brey

Notre Dame coach Mike Brey points during action with Monmouth Monday Nov. 12, 2012 in South Bend, Ind. (Associated Press Photo/Joe Raymond)

AP

Could a new ACC basketball rivalry be forming? Now that Notre Dame basketball has officially joined the ACC, there have been comments critical of the addition since Notre Dame’s football program can still remain independent.

One of the more vocal critics of this move has been Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski. Coach K said in a Q&A with the New York Post this week that he would never have let Notre Dame into the ACC given the current conditions of their agreement and had some interesting remarks.

“I think you can’t do something for one that you’re not willing to do for all in these type of situations. I would never have accepted personally them coming in and not being totally in,” Krzyzewski told the Post about Notre Dame.

Although Notre Dame coach Mike Brey has been relatively quiet on the realignment chatter, he felt that his former boss might have taken things a bit too far when he spoke with the South Bend Tribune about Coach K’s reaction.

“First of all, isn’t Mike Catholic?” Brey joked to the Tribune. “I feel I have to respond on behalf of my Irish. Come on, man. Come on. In this time of conference realignment, you’ve got to think outside the box and (ACC Commissioner) John Swofford did that. He got us and we’re in.

“Let’s wake up and smell the roses. This is a whole new era.”

And can you really blame Brey for getting upset at comments made in the middle of summer over a move that was made early last fall?

“That’s been out there – ‘God, they got in, but they got in without bringing football,’” Brey said. “I’m like, ‘We’re in man, pat us on the back. We’re in the family.’”

Brey and Coach K are noted friends -- as the South Bend Tribune article explains, they get dinner every year at the Final Four and during the July recruiting period -- but you wonder if this will create a new basketball rivalry in the ACC.

Notre Dame and Duke play once during the 2013-14 regular season with the game taking place in South Bend.

Time will tell if this potential rivalry will form or if the realignment talk will cool down, but I’d love to be a fly on the wall of that likely July recruiting period dinner between Brey and Coach K later this month.

Scott also writes for NY2LA Sports and can be followed on Twitter @phillipshoops