Cooper Flagg, Duke searching for answers after fateful Final Four collapse

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SAN ANTONIO — From their seats seven rows behind Duke’s bench, Ralph and Kelly Flagg had the perfect vantage point of the moment everything turned to dust.

With eight seconds left in Saturday’s national semifinal against No. 1 Houston, their son Cooper rose up for the turnaround jumper that legacies are made of. Sink it, and Duke’s in the national championship game for the first time in a decade. But miss it?

Everything, over. Immediately.

Which is why, as one of the best freshmen to play college basketball lifted off from just inside the left elbow, 68,252 sets of eyes inside the Alamodome — and millions more at home — tracked the path of a parabola that would decide Duke’s fate.

Clank.

Short, off the front iron. Houston rebound.

Ballgame.

Kelly, heart-shaped blue sunglasses atop her head, leaned her head onto Ralph’s shoulder to her right. A gentle thud, with the weight of a tank.

Three seconds later, Houston’s 70-67 stunner over Duke, one of the most catastrophic collapses in NCAA Tournament history, was complete. Cooper Flagg untucked his Blue Devils jersey and lifted his white undershirt up to his chin, grasping for something while everything else slipped out of his reach. His top-seeded Blue Devils led for nearly the entire game, including by nine points with 2:06 left. Even a six-point cushion with 34 seconds left was not enough for the top-ranked Blue Devils and their starting five full of future NBA studs to hold off the relentless Coogs.

While Houston’s comeback for the ages — the fifth-largest in Final Four history — will be told and retold for generations, so too will Duke’s complete disintegration. Over the past 18 months, Duke coach Jon Scheyer orchestrated this entire roster around Flagg and his national player of the year talents, surrounding the 18-year-old phenom with the ideal blend of fellow first-year stars and veteran role players. He hired a mental skills coach to teach his team emotional toughness, scheduled a vicious nonconference schedule to test the Blue Devils’ mettle, pushed every last one of his chips into the center for this player and this team — and then, poof.

The opportunity of a lifetime, evaporating via a 9-0 Houston run in the final 33 seconds of the Final Four. Scheyer, and Duke, will never shake the sting of what transpired on Saturday night in San Antonio.

“You’re an inch away from the national championship game,” Scheyer said after. “You go from some of the most special moments in the tournament to the most heartbreaking loss. … There’s a lot of pain that comes with this.”

Between this team and the 1999 iteration of the Blue Devils, neither of the two best squads in the history of KenPom’s 29-year database wound up winning it all.

Now, Duke still won the ACC regular-season and tournament titles and will hang an 18th Final Four banner in Cameron Indoor Stadium. But Monday night in San Antonio was the goal. How did this happen?

The play-by-play reads more graphic than some of Stephen King’s horror novels. The unraveling began with just over two minutes to play, after a Flagg 3-pointer and subsequent volleyball spike of a block gave Duke a nine-point lead and all the momentum. At that point, Kelly climbed onto her seat to see above the crowd around her, and started high-fiving anyone in arm’s reach. But then Houston guard Emanuel Sharp hit a contested layup, and on the other end, Tyrese Proctor had the ball poked away by Houston big JoJo Tugler. Sion James, Proctor’s backcourt mate, immediately walked over and told Proctor to “get over it” — but the avalanche, it turned out, was already underway.

The teams traded baskets thereafter, Flagg’s perfect free-throw shooting — he was eight-for-eight from the line — dueling against Sharp’s marksmanship. After Tugler earned an administrative technical foul with 1:14 to play, for slapping the ball out of James’ hands before the Duke guard inbounded it, Kon Knueppel sank a free throw that pushed the Blue Devils’ lead back to six. Cooper’s older brother, Hunter, gnawed at his nail once Knueppel’s shot fell good. And in the stands behind Duke’s bench, most everyone else — Kelly and Ralph; Scheyer’s wife, Marcelle; his parents, Jim and Laury; even Mike Krzyzewski, attending his first NCAA Tournament game since the loss that sent him into retirement, Duke’s last Final Four defeat in 2022 — did the same motion, over and over and over again: tilting their heads up at the small scoreboards underneath the Alamodome jumbotron, wishing time would speed up.

But if anything, it ground to a frame-by-frame halt.

Tugler blocking Knueppel’s layup attempt.

Another 3 from Sharp.

Three Houston defenders tipping and intercepting James’ ill-timed inbounds pass to Flagg, which turned into a Tugler follow-up dunk.

Proctor missing the front end of a one-and-one.

Flagg being called for a controversial over-the-back foul — his only one all game — on the ensuing rebound.

J’Wan Roberts sinking two free throws with 19.1 seconds left that, finally, pried the lead away from Duke and put Houston up one.

And finally, Flagg missing his would-be game-winner.

Everything that could possibly go wrong, all at once in a flood.

“A shot I’m willing to live with,” a teary-eyed Flagg said from a postgame dais. “Thought I got my feet set. Rose up. Left it short, obviously.”

Scheyer calling Flagg’s number with the game on the line was obviously no surprise. Not only is Flagg his clear top talent, but just look to the past. In each of Duke’s first three losses this season — against Kentucky, Kansas and Clemson — Scheyer pulled out the same end-of-game strategy: Give Flagg the rock, then get out of his way. So what if Flagg hadn’t delivered in those previous three instances? Your best player is your best player.

“Just be Cooper,” James said of Duke’s final play design. “We trust him, and that’s 100 times out of 100.”

In that final timeout, Scheyer looked his team in the eyes and delivered what would prove to be his final in-game message all season: “Right f—ing now, go take it. Are you ready?”

Fairly or not, Flagg’s miss will now forever be part of his legacy. Not one that outshines any of his astounding accomplishments, but also not something that can be ignored. His final college stat line of 27 points, seven rebounds, four assists, three blocks and two steals speaks for itself. He became the first player since steals and blocks became a measured statistic in 1986 to lead or co-lead his team in every major statistic in a Final Four game. And there were ample other plays in that calamitous final two minutes that, if you reverse them, yield a different outcome entirely.

But Duke’s last chance to advance to the national championship game was quite literally in the teenager’s hands — and he came up about three inches short.

After Flagg trotted off the Alamodome court, while Houston danced on it behind him, the grief set in. Ralph hunched over, rubbing the nape of his neck. Kelly could only stare straight ahead, blank-faced, lips pursed. Slowly, one by one, the other Duke dignitaries and parents around them made their exits — but the Flaggs sat in the sadness. The arena PA system only twisted the knife, playing the American Authors song “Best Day of My Life”: This is gonna be the best day of my li-iiiife …

“It just don’t feel good, bruh,” said sophomore guard Caleb Foster. “That’s all I can tell you.”

At 11:12 p.m. local time, after a small army of reporters and camera people assembled the length of the black-carpeted hallway outside Duke’s locker room, Scheyer finally emerged from behind hulking metal doors. He posted up for two obligatory TV interviews just steps away from massive gold lettering affixed to the hall’s concrete walls: THE ROAD ENDS HERE. “We were this close,” he told CBS Sports’ Tracy Wolfson, holding his fingers up an inch apart. He took the blame, saying he hadn’t put his young players in the positions they needed to be down the stretch.

That’s part of it. But he wasn’t why Duke made one shot over the final 9:16, or why Houston outscored the Blue Devils 25-8 after they took a 14-point edge with 8:17 to play.

Inside Duke’s funereal locker room, players coped in their own ways. Proctor leaned backward with a towel on his head. He’d gone 0-for-9 in Duke’s season-ending Elite Eight loss a year ago, a pivotal reason why he stayed for this season. “I love these guys,” he choked out. “It just sucks that we came up short.”

Walk-on Stanley Borden sat quietly, journaling in a small paper notebook with a purple mechanical pencil. Borden was a statistics peer tutor last semester, and Duke’s academic resource center gave him some thin brown notebooks. Ever since, he’s taken up journaling, his stream of consciousness writings providing clarity.

“There’s a thought when you have a loss like this, like, what was it all for?” Borden said. “Obviously, a lot of the sacrifices (we make are) to win a national championship — or at least go to the title game, because nothing’s guaranteed. So there was this kind of despair of, well then, what was it all for, if we’re not? And if we didn’t? Which, it’s still hard to believe.”

Even in a room five-deep with media members, the propane burners keeping Duke’s NCAA-provided barbecue trays warm at the back of the room could be heard. Players slowly migrated into the separate coach’s locker room.

Noticeably absent were Duke’s three star-studded freshman: Flagg and Knueppel — who combined for 43 of Duke’s 67 points, and who were elsewhere in the Alamodome conducting their final collegiate news conference — as well as 7-foot-2 center Khaman Maluach. He somehow finished with no rebounds in 21 minutes, the only game all season that the projected lottery pick didn’t gobble up a single board, another stunner on a night stockpiled with them.

By the time Flagg and Knueppel rolled up on a golf cart six minutes shy of midnight, most everyone had scattered. Towel around his neck, Flagg thanked his ride before disappearing into the locker room again, this time for good. What he said or did, we’ll never know. But at some point, he’ll again glance at the P.F. Chang’s fortune cookie message he’d slid inside the back of his clear phone case:

Many successes are coming your way

Undoubtedly.

Just not on Monday.

Not the one Flagg, and Duke, did everything in pursuit of.

 (Photo of Cooper Flagg: Alex Slitz / Getty Images)

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