This is how quickly the world can change in March.
One minute, Duke is everyone's top seed, cocked and fully loaded for the NCAA tournament. All-Everything Cooper Flagg is going up for a rebound late in the first half of a game with Georgia Tech. The Yellow Jackets lead, but everyone knows that won’t last because hardly anyone has gotten in the Blue Devils’ way this winter and stayed in one piece. Flagg would help take care of that with another golden stat line.
The next minute, Flagg is pounding a bench chair in pain and frustration after landing wrong on his left ankle. The blue-clad fans in the stands caught by the television camera look as if they have just seen a velociraptor attack formation coming their way. The collective gasp from DukeWorld probably registers on the Richter scale.
And in their workroom on the north edge of Indianapolis, did the members of the NCAA selection committee just all slap their foreheads with their hands? If Flagg is out long, what should that do or not do to the Blue Devils’ seeding? A possible... ah... complication.
Flagg is the epicenter of college basketball this season, and he is not even the only Blue Devil to go down. Maliq Brown, an important cog in the Blue Devils' prized defense, dislocated his shoulder. Again. What is this, a plague? That pleasure cruise Duke has been on most of the season, a rogue wave just rolled over the decks.
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Duke comes back to win, even as the basketball universe restlessly awaits the Flagg X-rays. Negative, by the way. Afterward, the voices of the Blue Devils are trying to put all this in perspective. Coach Jon Scheyer says — more or less — that he wouldn’t play Flagg the next couple of days with a Blue Devil pitchfork held to his back. Even if Flagg could. “It’s not worth it,” Scheyer says. “It just isn’t.”
He describes how he had rallied his shaken troops. Something he might have to do again.
“Really my message was to do simple. Sometimes you see Maliq go out, Cooper go out, and you feel like you have to really make up for it with amazing plays and offense and scoring, when in reality, you need to do your job,” he says. “That was my biggest thing. Just do simple.”
Isaiah Evans, who came off the bench for 14 very helpful points, notes the resolve that was displayed in the 78-70 victory.
“I think it just shows that we're a real team. It's not really about one person or two people. It's about Duke.. Duke is going to handle business all the time. That's what we came here to do, we came here to play ball. No matter the circumstances, whatever happens throughout the game, we're going to keep playing.”
But the question suddenly rages now in the final days before Selection Sunday: Just how long are they going to have to keep playing without Flagg and Brown? To think, when the game began Thursday, few skies looked bluer than Duke’s. Now, a giant cloud of undetermined duration.
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Meanwhile, nearly a thousand miles away, Houston is on a roll against Colorado in the Big 12 tournament. The Cougars are flat-out national championship contenders too, and one reason is graduate student forward J’Wan Roberts. This will be his 144th Houston career victory, the school record by a bunch. He is also only the fourth Houston player with both 1,000 points and 1,000 rebounds. The others are named Elvin Hayes, Hakeem Olajuwon and Greg Anderson. There's a high-powered club. Roberts is one of this team's rocks.
He's driving to the basket against Colorado early in the second half. Wait, he’s limping off. Injured right ankle, giving him and Flagg a matched set. He returns to the bench later but doesn’t play. For how long? The Cougars now have the same uncomfortable questions as Duke. Houston has a history with such things. The Cougars had to go the final 26 minutes of last year’s Sweet 16 game without injured All-American Jamal Shead. They lost by three points. To Duke.
Conference championship week can throw curves like that. This one has.
Texas might have won its way into the bracket on Thursday,
Indiana might have lost its way out of it.
There had been some faint doubts about Gonzaga, even with the second-highest scoring average and field goal percentage in the nation. Then the Zags managed only 58 points and 41 percent shooting the other night but had the biggest win of their season, topping Saint Mary’s 58-51 for the West Coast Conference title. Two of the most efficient offenses in the country combined to go 1-for-30 on 3-point attempts.
Wofford, the No. 6 seed, won the Southern Conference.
Delaware, the No. 12 seed, nearly won the Coastal Athletic Association.
UCF, who once lost to Kansas 99-48 this season took the Jayhawks into double overtime. A one-and-done Big 12 tournament would have only raised more Kansas uncertainty.
USC committed eight turnovers in a four-minute stretch in the second half against Rutgers, was outscored 31-7 in points off turnovers, and still beat the Scarlet Knights in double overtime.
Iowa, the 15th and last team to make into the Big Ten tournament, promptly knocked out Ohio State, probably squishing the Buckeyes’ last Selection Sunday hopes. Then the Hawkeyes shot 54.9 percent and had only five turnovers against Illinois – but lost 106-94. It was a dunkathon with 88 total points in the paint but also a 3-point shooting contest with both sides combining to hit 23 of them. Defense? Bah, humbug. It had the feel of an NBA All-Star Game.
The track meet was entertaining to watch, but Iowa coach Fran McCaffery missed the last part of it, as he was requested by the officials to head for the locker room after his second technical foul. McCaffery did not seem happy. Maybe Illinois’ 30-10 gap in free throw attempts had something to do with it.
Anyway, it was another wild moment in a crazy-bounce week. The pre-Selection Sunday world can turn in a hurry. Cooper Flagg was the cover player of the season. Now he has the most-watched left ankle in sports.
