Duke, Cooper Flagg shut down Alabama as 2nd top seed advances to Final Four

With less than seven minutes separating Duke from the Final Four berth it’s been chasing all season, Jon Scheyer huddled his team and took a deep breath.

What he said next would be the thread: Either the thing that sent the Blue Devils to San Antonio … or the most misread moment of Scheyer’s three-year tenure.

“This is our game.”

And soon enough, it was.

Two days after Alabama posted one of the truly historic offensive efforts in the hallowed history of March Madness, Duke dialed up its top-five defense one more time and put the clamps on the Crimson Tide 85-65 in Newark, New Jersey, to advance to its First Final Four under Scheyer and the program’s 18th, but first since 2022.

Duke will play the winner of Sunday’s South Regional final between Houston and Tennessee on Saturday. No. 1 Florida advanced earlier Saturday after defeating Texas Tech.

Duke’s defense had carried the Blue Devils to ACC regular-season and tournament titles, to the No. 1 ranking in the country and the No. 1 seed in the East Regional.

Now, only two more games separate the Blue Devils (35-3) from immortality and a sixth national championship banner to hang in Cameron Indoor Stadium.

Given Alabama’s offensive explosion on Thursday against Arizona, Saturday’s regional final was always going to be decided by whether Duke could sufficiently slow Nate Oats’ team’s high-octane offense. The Crimson Tide (28-9) finished the game shooting a dismal 23 for 65 (35.4%) overall and 8 for 32 from 3 – a dramatic departure from two days earlier, when Alabama made an NCAA Tournament-record 25 3-pointers.

But perhaps most noteworthy of all was limiting a team that averaged 13.7 fastbreak points per game – the 18th most in America, per CBB Analytics – to just eight.

It helped that Duke couldn’t have asked for a better start, with Cooper Flagg (who finished with 16 points, nine rebounds and three assists) draining a top-of-the-key 3 on the team’s first possession to kick off a 15-5 run.

And while Alabama eventually settled in, that initial cushion proved pivotal to Duke building a game-long lead, which stood at 46-37 at halftime. So did the fact that Duke’s offense – which entered averaging 94 points in its first three tournament games – faced little early resistance. The Blue Devils shot 56.3% in the first half.

Florida rallies past Texas Tech

Florida (34-4) is headed to the Final Four after an 84-79 win over Texas Tech (28-9) in San Francisco, and it’s due largely to Walter Clayton Jr.’s timely shot-making.

After two consecutive 1-and-1 misses from Texas Tech, Clayton stepped back, pulled up and drained a 3-pointer with 1:47 to play, tying the score at 75.

Or maybe the biggest shot was the 3-pointer Clayton hit just 48 seconds later, after Tech had regained a 77-75 lead.

That make gave Florida a 78-77 lead. After a missed 3 by Tech’s Darrion Williams, a couple of made free throws from Florida and another missed 3 by Williams, Clayton stepped to the line with 10.2 seconds to play, his team up 80-77. He drained both.

The senior guard from Florida, who was named the most outstanding player of the West Regional, finished with 30 points, eight in the final 107 seconds.

He also went 13 for 14 from the line, including 11 for 12 in the second half.