JACKSONVILLE, Fla. Duke is the all-in play for the ACC in this NCAA basketball tournament.

Oh sure, I saw the brackets. I know the league got six bids.

Big deal. So what?

Look at those other teams:

Clemson, which made Wake Forest look good as recently as March 7.

Wake Forest, which has made just about every team east of the Mississippi River look good for the past month.

Florida State, which made N.C. State look good. Twice.

Georgia Tech, which probably would have fired its coach had North Carolina been able to hold a double-digit lead in the ACC tournament first round.

Maryland, which is better than the others but hardly best in show.

Admit it, all five of those teams would shock themselves if they were still in this thing next weekend.

Call me Dick Vitale, but this one is all about Duke, baby. Normally, the ACC has a couple of good chances to keep winning championships. But with Carolina having removed itself from the main event long ago, the ACC is a one-horse operation this spring.

The good news is Duke's players like the pressure.

"We do," Blue Devils senior Lance Thomas said Thursday. "We worked to get here. Nobody gave us anything. I like the position we're in and we understand you're not promised the next game anymore."

The bad news is Duke hasn't survived the second round in two of the past three seasons and last reached a Final Four in 2004.

It was just a year ago, following the Blue Devils' one-sided loss to Villanova in the third round, that much of the tournament buzz was about how thoroughly Carolina had replaced Duke as the ACC's meal ticket. Mike Krzyzewski's ability to ever again duplicate his old magic became a topic of national - maybe international - sports debate.

There was one theory that the Olympic program had become Krzyzewski's priority to the extent that he could no longer piece together a great college team.

Those same issues will pop up again if Duke makes a fast exit, and Krzyzewski did remind everyone again Thursday that this is not a "great" team in the classic sense of greatness.

"We are a very good team," he said. "But our team has played great in some games, but we've been very good all year."

NCAA championships have been won by teams that failed the eye test for greatness. Jim Valvano once said of his 1983 Wolfpack champs, "We may not have been a great team, but we sure did some great things."

That team lost 10 times and went only 8-6 in the ACC regular season. Duke is 29-5 and seeded No. 1 in the South entering tonight's first round against Arkansas-Pine Bluff. No matter what, the Devils will post another great - at least near-great - record.

But compared to the dominating, intimidating, suffocating Krzyzewski teams of the early '90s, the current players do seem a mite warm and fuzzy. Thomas and his teammates don't do a lot of growling and floor slapping. They're nice to folks, even folks on other teams.

You do, however, get the feeling that these guys mean business. Technically, they may be similar to those teams that lost early in '07 and '08. But when it comes to one of Krzyzewski's all-time favorite words - focus - the '10 team has rarely whiffed.

So go ahead and cheer for those other ACC teams in the chase. But if the league is going to have anything to brag about this year, Duke has to deliver.