Student attendance at Duke men’s basketball games has fallen consistently over the last five years, even dropping after Duke won its fourth national championship in 2010.

This season, approximately 650 undergraduates have attended each game, 150 fewer than during the 2008-09 season. As a result, Duke Athletics has begun to sell an increasing number of general admission tickets in the student section on a regular basis.

“It has nothing to do with the revenue. We just want it to be full,” Director of Marketing and Relations Mike Forman said. “If there were 1,200 students every game we would love it.”

Blue Devils guard Austin Rivers, removed from a starting lineup for one of the few times in his life, scored 20 points off the bench against Wake Forest.

When Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski informed Rivers that he would come off the bench against Wake Forest — marking the first time this season he wouldn’t be starting — the highly regarded freshman admitted he seethed.

“The past three days I haven’t slept. I’ve been thinking,” Rivers said. “I was so angry. You have no idea how angry I was. … But I realize that I need to mature.

“That’s what (Krzyzewski’s) intention was. I mean, he’s a genius. He knows what he’s doing. He’s going to make me better and this team is going to make me better.”

When Kyrie Irving departed for the NBA after his freshman year, he told his father that he would return to finish his degree.

“Five years,” Irving says with a grin, then pauses. “That’s extremely difficult.”

The five-year clock started ticking the moment NBA commissioner David Stern announced the former Duke point guard was Cleveland’s choice as the No. 1 overall pick in the 2011 draft last June.

“You may interpret it as ambitious, but we’re an education family,” says his father, Drederick, who was in Charlotte on Monday afternoon for the Cavaliers’ game against the Bobcats. “So for Kyrie, a five-year agreement to get his degree, that isn’t anything that’s foreign. He understands that a lot of people in our family, they have their degree, so it’s kind of inevitable for him that he’ll get his.”

Austin Rivers appears to going through a rut that began after his Dec. 30th performance against Western Michigan.

Since a 20-point effort in Duke’s win over Western Michigan, Rivers has averaged 8.6 points per game while only shooting 36.4 percent from the floor and 21.4 percent for 3-pointers.

“I just think he’s going through what a freshman goes through,” Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said. “There’s adjustments to everything. Overall, he’s done it really well.

“There’s adjustments to more physicality, speed, height, experience. There’s not one adjustment – all freshmen have to go through it. He’s done it fairly well to average about 14 points per game with the schedule we’ve had. He has to continue to make those adjustments.”

Duke has watched opponents blow by them off the dribble or lose them on screens with regularity.

"We didn't really trust each other," junior forward Ryan Kelly said. "To have a good defense, you have to be able to trust each other, know each other, have each other's back."

Without trust, players said, mistakes happen.

"Sometimes you don't trust guys behind you, so you don't pressure the ball as much and you get beat," junior guard Seth Curry said. "Guys don't take charges or you're just not guarding your man."

The Blue Devils are the second-best team in the ACC and should be a top-two seed in the NCAA tournament.

But so far, they're responsible for the worst defensive-efficiency ranking of any Duke team in the kenpom era (2003-present), having dropped from fourth in '09-10 and eighth in '10-11 to 32nd this season.

Duke’s transition defense has dropped from 0.835 points per possession (which put them in the 95th percentile last year) to 1.000 points per possession (in the 64th percentile.

The Blue Devils’ defense on pick-and-roll ballhandlers has also dropped, falling from 0.638 points per possession (90th percentile) to 0.822 points per possession (28th percentile).

The Blue Devils want to turn up the pace and the players seem to be fully on board with that.

"We're just going to keep pushing it and pushing it and pushing it, just kind of keep ramming it down them," guard Austin Rivers said.

That should increase the number of possessions for Duke, which tends to have enough skilled players at the offensive end to turn that into more production. In their first two games since Christmas, Duke has launched 63 and 62 field-goal attempts for the two highest figures of the season in that category.

"That can be a good thing for our team," forward Mason Plumlee said. "That's the most fun way to play and that's how we want to play."