SAN ANTONIO — There have been larger comebacks in Final Four history, but perhaps none more horrifying for the losing side than how Houston killed Duke’s season Saturday night.
What an evil trick Kelvin Sampson’s team played on 37-year-old Jon Scheyer, who saw his third season as a head coach end in mutilating fashion, the kind he’ll never be allowed to forget. Scheyer will have this attached to his reputation until he can atone and find himself coaching on a Monday night in April. That might be in one year; it might never happen. No matter the gap, it will haunt. Every so often we get a game in the Final Four that lives on forever. This game — Houston’s 70-67 win here — is immortal.
For the better part of 90 minutes, Duke seemed to be in control with its talent and its size and its Cooper Flagg and its Kon Knueppel and its everything else that has made this Duke team one of the best the sport has seen in decades.
But Duke had not faced a squad like Houston all season.
And so, it was not prepared to fight Houston, on its terms, in the biggest moments and when it mattered most. There is no escaping Houston, there is only the slim chance of survival for the luckiest. Duke might have believed it would live on, but talk to any coach who’s been upended by 69-year-old Sampson in the past few years, and they’ll reveal the scars that sustain after facing the toughest program with the toughest dudes in college basketball.
Before the agonizing reversal, the Blue Devils thought they could beat the Cougars on pathways and playmaking like most of their other 35 victories over the past five months.
The mirage reached peak effect when Flagg dropped a dunk in with 10:31 to go to give Duke a 58-45 lead.
Then and there, though no one in the Alamodome could have known it, was the beginning of the end.
What ensued was not death by a thousand cuts. Houston downed Duke by systematically suffocating the best team in the sport for the second half of the second half, then started chopping off appendages in the closing seconds.
With 8:17 remaining, Duke led 59-45.
Then it was Duke 64, Houston 55 with a little more than two minutes left. If you think you’re bleeding out the clock against this team, think again.
With 1:15 to play, Duke’s edge got down to seven: 66-59.
And then there is this reality: The same Houston team that needed 8 minutes and 9 seconds to score its first nine points of the game needed only 33 seconds in the end to outscore Duke 9-0 and win by three.
The loss is so monstrous in its shock value, it takes a minute to emerge from the haze to recognize an uncomfortable truth: Duke lost for reasons that were always looming, dating all the way back to the preseason. This uber-talented team was recognized as the most loaded and promising of any coming into 2024-25. But talent alone rarely wins the NCAA Tournament; the event almost seems to react in hostile tones against that kind of roster-building hubris.
Duke’s reliance on a roster filled with future one-and-done lottery picks, in addition to most other players who did not have year-over-year experience with each other,left room for skepticism.
Could Duke be great in this era by relying on those pieces?
For five months, it worked.
Then it all fell apart over the course of a little more than 30 minutes on Saturday night.
Duke’s inexperience played a major factor in its meltdown against a Houston team whose starting five’s average age is north of 22. Flagg and Knueppel combined for 43 points and 14 rebounds; this loss isn’t on them, but we were waiting on one or two more scores in the closing minutes that never came. Scheyer drew up a play on Duke’s penultimate possession that left plenty to be desired: a 15-foot fallaway from Flagg, with sixth-year Cougar mainstay J’Wan Roberts getting plenty of arm and hand in Flagg’s face. The shot was short by a few inches, and Duke’s season came crashing down as the ball fell into Mylik Wilson’s hands with eight seconds to go.
The final shot of Flagg’s Duke career might as well have been drawn up by Houston’s staff.
“You knew it was going to Cooper,” Cougars assistant coach Kellen Sampson told CBS Sports. “In all of their close games, the ball has been in his hands. The only thing we kicked around was, do we trap? Do we send an extra defender and make someone else (beat us)? We gave an extra defender in the first half and he carved us up. We made the decision that we were going to trust our grown-up on the teenager. The grown-up won.”
Extending to other preseason curiosities: Junior Blue Devils guard Tyrese Proctor, who had some great moments in recent weeks after a letdown of a sophomore season, missed the front end of a one-and-one with 20 seconds left, Duke up 67-66, that would’ve given the Blue Devils just a little more cushion against a Houston team that was crawling out of the quicksand.
Piece by piece, it all dissolved for Duke.
Scheyer has done a remarkable job in three seasons running this program. His 89 wins are tied with Brad Stevens and Brad Underwood for the most to start a D-I head coaching career. But this loss feels, in this moment, unshakeable. The deeper Duke goes, the more nightmarish the endings since Mike Krzyzewski retired in 2022 in a nightmarish scenario himself (losing to hated rival UNC in the national semifinals). In 2023, Scheyer’s first season, Duke took a thumping in the second round at the hands of a much stronger Tennessee team. Last year, 11-seed NC State rocked a much more talented Duke team in the Elite Eight.
That one was painful, so much so that it led Scheyer to build this team with specific intention.
They didn’t have enough grown-ups.
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Even the final play was emblematic of the vomit-worthy spiral Duke spun itself into. Sion James hurled a passed the length of the floor with 3.7 seconds to go, tossing it like chum to the sharks. Houston deflected — naturally — and the Blue Devils never even got one more chance at one more chance.
Game over, season over, and Duke played party to one of the most shocking giveaways on a Final Four stage we’ll ever see. It all seemed so possible until it became crystal clear why it was never meant to be.
A result like this produces stats that boggle the mind. Duke never grabbed a rebound after 3:24 in the second half, when Flagg snared a defensive board. Khaman Maluach, every millimeter of 7 feet, 2 inches, somehow got blanked on the boards. He logged 21 minutes and could not grab a single carom. Only Houston could take 7-2 guy who had wrecked teams and make him a non-factor.
“Duke can out-talent us, but they can’t out-length us,” Kellen Sampson told CBS Sports heading into Saturday’s matchup.
He was right. Every inch that Houston needed, it had. Every play in the final three minutes Houston had to have, it willed into existence.
How about this dose of the insane: The No. 1 offense in the sport this season — and the most efficient in KenPom history — managed one field goal in the final 10 minutes and 31 seconds.
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Flagg, Knueppel, Maluach, Proctor and James: they’ll all almost definitely be gone. They’ve played their last game in white and royal blue. It’s a bitter finale. The very things that prompted some to question Duke’s championship bona fides five months ago wound up being the vulnerabilities that prevented it from achieving the kind of immortality that would have put this team on the same level with the best that have ever played there.
Instead, there is the dread and regret and disappointment and second-guessing. A great team had a bad ending and the damn thing about it all is the two realities feel like they were destined to coexist. Scheyer did a great job in building this roster, but it was not built to win six games at the end of the season. There was too much reliance on putting so many players together who did not know each other until last summer. Not even one of the best one-and-done prospects ever wasn’t stopping that.
Cooper Flagg was amazing this season, but he was not good enough to lift Duke by to a national title through force of will. And if he can’t do it after that season on a team like this, then no team is winning it all in the portal era with this many freshmen playing such prominent roles.
Veteran-laden Houston will face veteran-laden Florida on Monday night for the national title. Duke will watch from home and Scheyer will start over again. A special season earns a bittersweet description: 2024-25 Duke is now one of the best teams to not win a national title.
