Final Four: Ranking Duke’s worst NCAA tournament losses since its last title, including that collapse vs. Houston

Duke’s March Madness run ended on Saturday at the Final Four, and what an ending it was. Despite the best efforts of Cooper Flagg, the Blue Devils blew a double-digit lead against Houston and crashed out of their most promising NCAA tournament run in years.

It was a painful loss, but it has company in Duke’s ouvré of mortifying March Madness exits. This is a very proud program that has seen some of the best NBA prospects of the last decade come through its doors, with no title to show for it since they won it all in 2015 under Mike Krzyzewski.

Advertisement

You can’t do that without some games that make you want to crawl into a hole in the ground.

Here’s a list of the Blue Devils’s worst NCAA tournament losses in the past 10 title-less years. It’s worth noting the Blue Devils didn’t make the tournament in 2021 when they were 13-11 and had no tournament to play in for 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Three of its losses (2016, 2018, 2023) were also as lower seeds and therefore not included.

5. South Carolina, 2017 second round

Leading scorers: Jayson Tatum, Luke Kennard

Tatum, Kennard and Grayson Allen have gone on to enjoy successful NBA career, but their time together in college was less than the sum of its parts.

Advertisement

Duke was ranked No. 1 in the preseason AP Poll with Allen as a National Player of the Year contender and Tatum and Harry Giles looming as the program’s next great freshmen. The best Duke teams under Mike Krzyzewski combined NBA lottery-bound freshman and veteran leaders, and this one definitely fit the bill.

It was curious, then, that this team didn’t really get going until Kennard, a five-star recruit in his sophomore year, stepped up as the team’s first option on offense and became an All-American. That reworking seemed to save Duke’s season, until it fell apart against a South Carolina team ready for everything they had.

Duke just couldn’t stop the Gamecocks’ Sindarius Thornwell in the second half, and a season’s worth of dysfunction all came floating back up.

4. Michigan State, 2019 Elite Eight

Leading scorers: Zion Williamson, R.J. Barrett

Advertisement

Williamson’s NBA career has been rockier than expected, but it cannot be forgotten how much a sensation he was in his only year with Duke, or how he was only their third-best freshman on some recruiting rankings.

Williamson, Barrett and Cam Reddish gave Duke the top three recruits in the country and they absolutely lived up to the hype (in aggregate). That team felt almost inevitable, then No. 2 seed Michigan State showed it was no slouch either. In one of Tom Izzo’s best coaching jobs, the Spartans withstood some inhuman stuff from Williamson to beat the tournament’s top overall seed.

By the standard of missed opportunities, this team might top any on this list. At least Flagg and co., whom we could describe as similarly talented, made the Final Four.

3. NC State, 2024 Elite Eight

Leading scorers: Kyle Filipowski, Jared McCain

Advertisement

From an NBA standpoint, this is the least-talented Duke team on this list. The No. 4 seeded Blue Devils looked good, not great in their second year under Scheyer, but knocked off No. 1 Houston in the Sweet Sixteen to set up what looked like an extremely favorable matchup to reach the Final Four.

NC State only reached the tournament because of an unprecedented ACC Tournament run, which included a win over Duke. A repeat win for the over-achieving Wolfpack was a tall order, right?

Right?

Duke has had better teams lose in the tournament, but there have only been a few times when a loss like that hit so close to home, against an in-state foe they don’t even call their biggest rival.

2. Houston, 2025 Final Four

Leading scorers: Cooper Flagg, Kon Kneuppel

Advertisement

The best that can be said about Saturday’s loss is that it was a quality matchup, a fellow No. 1 seed, and it required a very questionable call by the officials.

The rest, well, let’s recall how Duke led by as much as 14 in this game, the fifth-largest blown lead in Final Four history, and by nine with less than three minutes left. Flagg appeared to deliver multiple daggers, but Houston just kept sticking around while the Blue Devils offense went absolute-zero cold, with only one field goal in the final 10 minutes.

Duke entered the Final Four as the odds-on favorite to win it all and just needed a semblance of an offense from a team with three projected lottery picks, one of them perhaps the best American prospect since Anthony Davis or LeBron James, to reach the championship game against Florida.

Advertisement

Instead, it got what would be an all-time worst loss for most programs. But not Duke.

1. UNC, 2022 Final Four

Leading scorers: Paolo Banchero, Wendell Moore Jr.

Let’s be real: Duke could have blown a 50-point lead on Saturday and it would not have been No. 1 on this list.

There is no redeeming facing your biggest rival — the biggest rivalry in all of college basketball — for the first time in the NCAA Tournament, in the Final Four, in your legendary coach’s final game, and losing to a No. 8 seed on a complete YOLO run, with Caleb Love providing the dagger.

It does not matter what Duke does from here on out and how many rings Jon Scheyer or a successor end up winning. For the rest of our lives, any Duke fan publicly reminiscing about the great Coach K will have to look over their shoulder, just to make sure there isn’t a smirking UNC fan about to remind them how it all ended.

There’s no beating that.