Preview: Another Complicated All-in-the-Family Weekend for the Whites

Ask Jane White what she thinks about UCF playing Florida Atlantic in football Saturday night, and there's not likely to be much of an excitement level.
 
She'd prefer it did not happen at all—or that it could somehow end in a draw.
 
After all, these are two of her sons in the roles of opposing athletics directors. They both can't win.
 
That's become a more common and recent unintended consequence of a dyed-in the-wool college sports family that features Jane (a former track and field coach at Central Michigan) as the husband of Duke athletics director Kevin (he was formerly in that same role at Notre Dame, Arizona State, Tulane, Maine and Loras) and mother to sons Danny (the athletics director at UCF since late 2015), Brian (in that same position at FAU since March 2018) and Mike (heading into his fifth season as men's basketball coach at Florida). And don't forget daughter Mariah (Chappell), a former collegiate swimmer at Duke and now assistant athletics director for administration at SMU.
 
It was one thing to think Kevin's long career at the college level meant there would be plenty of athletic contests where there were people he knew well--and had even hired and worked with—on the other sideline or in the same press box.
 
It's another matter when it's the immediate family.
 
But that's what it has come to now for the Whites—and it's even more complicated with all three of Jane's sons representing different schools in the ultra-competitive state of Florida.
 
The 2018-19 football series between UCF and FAU actually was announced in January 2015, 10 months before Danny came on board in Orlando. Brian took over in Boca Raton just six months before the first of those games was played last September. (For those keeping count, it was a 56-36 UCF victory.)
 
"It didn't take us long to figure it out," says Danny of that pair of upcoming football games. "At first I kind of thought it was a cool novelty, but as you get closer to the game and realize somebody's got to lose, it becomes more and more awkward."
 
Danny says—given a choice—he'd much rather not face off routinely against members of his own family: 
 
"You want him (his brother Brian) and his teams to win every time they play. But somebody's got to lose the game. It was awkward last year, it's awkward this year. I'd prefer not to play a family member if we could avoid it.
 
"We talk a lot anyway, and then when you have these experiences four years in a row with hurricanes, it takes a lot of communication with the other school the week of the game to go over all the scenarios and figure out what the right play is. This one wasn't that hard to figure—we just wanted to make sure both our teams could continue to train. So, I talked to Brian about all of that a bunch this week."
 
Danny absolutely understands it's a complicated time for his parents. This week comes with something of a reprieve, if only because Duke plays a Saturday night home game about the same time UCF and FAU kick off.
 
And Danny knows what to expect.
 
"They wish we could both win," he says. "When this happens, the family group texts just sort of go silent. Everybody's watching but no one wants to say too much.
 
"We save our bragging rights and our trash-talking for much simpler things--like cornhole or darts."
 
It's a new-fangled version of the olden-days family basketball games in which Mike, Brian and Danny fought it out in the driveway.
 
Adds Kevin, "I would liken it to a root canal. It's something I absolutely harbor disdain for—the prospect of a contest like this makes me queasy and anxious. I've done everything I can around our different family members to dissuade folks from having these kinds of contests. I suspect Danny and Brian, at least to some degree, feel the same way.
 
"Jane feels my pain. I'd much rather go to the dentist and have a root canal than go to one of those games." 
 
In 2017-18 Mike's 23rd-ranked Florida basketball team went up against ninth-rated Duke and his dad in an early season game in Portland (for the record, Duke won it 87-84). Then last year in the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship, Duke barely escaped a second-round game versus UCF in Columbia, South Carolina, in a Sunday contest that drew monster television ratings. Kevin missed that one since he is a member of the NCAA Men's Basketball Committee and could not be assigned to a site where his own team (or any of his sons' teams) competed.
 
"But, still, I know so many people at Duke," says Danny. "We're trying to win the game, they're trying to win the game. It's not the most comfortable thing. But college athletics is a small world so it's going to happen.
 
"Next weekend we've got Bernard (Muir, the Stanford athletics director) coming in. (Kevin hired Muir at Notre Dame while Danny was finishing his degree in South Bend.) Last year I was on the phone the whole week with Bubba (Cunningham, the athletics director at North Carolina, and another Notre Dame administrator in Danny's college days) because of the hurricane."
 
Then last November, Brian and the FAU men's basketball team came to UCF and went home winners by a single point.
 
Kevin knows exactly what will happen on Saturday night when Duke plays host to North Carolina A&T, with the Blue Devils set to kick off an hour before UCF and FAU begin:
 
"Jane has an ability in these circumstances to get into a moment of denial. Then once she can't avoid the fact the game is actually happening, she becomes highly stressed. But up until kickoff she is very good at denial. Jane is a very positive outlook person—right until the game starts she thinks everybody is going to win. It's all going to be great and then the game starts and she's a mess.
 
"It's probably a very good thing that we (Duke) have a game at about the same time Saturday night. She'll be in our press box, and she'll be glued to that (UCF-FAU) game and in the same breath glued to our game and she will be totally monopolized by all the stress coming from every different direction."
 
By now, Danny also has a pretty good notion of what to expect from his mother Saturday night.
 
"Likely she reaches out on the family text and tries to say something positive about both teams," he says.
 
"She'll be working hard to be Switzerland."