Duke’s agony: The concerns many had at season’s start were finally exposed in Final Four collapse to Houston

SAN ANTONIO, Texas — 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. Every so often we get a game in the Final Four that lives on forever. Houston’s 70-67 win here will be played back and referenced as part of the dramatic power of this tournament for decades to come.

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 team like Houston all season and so 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 be the Cougars on pathways and play-makes like most of its other 35 victories over the past five months.

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 lead 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 needed only 33 seconds to outscore Duke 9-0 and win by three points.

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 team coming into 2024-25. But talent alone rarely wins the NCAA Tournament; the event almost seems to react in an aggressive manner against that kind of roster-building hubris.

Duke’s reliance on a roster filled with future one-and-done draft picks and a bunch of 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 average age is north of 22. Flagg and Knueppel combined for 43 points and 14 rebounds. They needed two or four more, but Houston wasn’t having it. Scheyer drew up a play on Duke’s penultimate possession that left plenty to be desired: a 15-foot fallaway from Flagg, with 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. 

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 fell apart. 

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, ever. 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 Tennessee. Last year, 11-seed NC State rocked a much more talented Duke team in the Elite Eight. 

That one was painful enough. 

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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. 

A result like this produces stats that boggle the mind. Duke never grabbed a rebound after 3:24, 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. Another: Cooper Flagg’s rebound at 3:24 was Duke’s final one of the game. His final shot attempt might as well have been drawn up by Houston’s staff.

“You knew it was going to Cooper,” Cougars assistant coach Kellen Sampson said. “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.”

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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. 

Saturday night was a horror show. The very things that prompted some to question Duke’s championship bona fides five months ago wound up being the vulnerabilities that prevented Duke 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 could not have done a better job in building this roster, but its reliance on the unknown and unfamiliar was going to be its downfall. One of the best one-and-done prospects ever wasn’t stopping that. 

Houston will face veteran-laden Florida on Monday night for the national title. Duke will watch from home and start over again. And it will join the list of the best teams to never win a national title. It all seemed so possible until it became crystal clear why it was never meant to be.