Duke’s Collapse vs UConn Adds to Troubling March Pattern

Braylon Mullins’ buzzer-beating 3-point heave is already being discussed in the same pantheon as Christian Laettner’s and Kris Jenkins’ game-winners of yore.

Good. He deserves that. A freshman? From the edge of the March Madness logo at center court? After he missed his first four threes and had UConn fans lining up to hate on him? Are you kidding me?

There’s no debate Mullins added himself into the NCAA Tournament annals with this shot, but I find myself much more interested in the losing end of UConn’s 73-72 Elite Eight win Sunday.

Duke. Chokers again.

There’s some poetry to the fact that the Blue Devils blew a 19-point lead over UConn in this game. Because 19 points is the exact amount that their Tobacco Road buddies North Carolina led VCU in the first round of this very tournament, just for the Rams to bring the Tar Heels to heel.

North Carolina made some backbreaking turnovers and boneheaded mistakes at the end of its loss, like failing to use a timeout to prevent a crucial five-second violation. None of that will be as widely remembered as Cayden Boozer, Cameron’s less gifted twin, trying a difficult pass up court as though he needed to avoid a 10-second call when he could have just let the game clock expire.

(Oh, and Jon Scheyer had a timeout in his pocket, too.)

And while I’m sure Duke fans wouldn’t trade this outcome for getting humiliated in the first round like their paler-blue partners, it must hurt 50 times as bad to bungle it this late in the bracket, yet again.

Because a pattern has officially emerged for the Dukies. They found a way to squander a 14-point lead in the Final Four last year against Houston. They let a smiling bowling ball named DJ Burns and an 11th-seeded NC State score 55 points on them in the second half of an Elite Eight loss the year before.

People will say it’s Scheyer -- and for what it’s worth, he didn’t have a much better press conference than Hubert Davis did in the wake of UNC’s flop.

But there’s another strange coincidence to underline here. Duke came up short in that very same building in Washington back in 2019, when the program was still under Mike Krzyzewski’s watchful eye. I was there. I watched the No. 1 seed lose to the No. 2 -- Michigan State, in this case -- by a single point in the Elite Eight.

That game was Zion Williamson’s final appearance in a Duke uniform. And that’s the larger point here. Duke hasn’t appeared in a national title game since winning the 2015 championship.

In the intervening time, the likes of Brandon Ingram, Jayson Tatum, Williamson, RJ Barrett, Jalen Johnson, Paolo Banchero, Jared McCain, Cooper Flagg, Kon Knueppel and now Cameron Boozer have walked through those halls. And not a single one of them played for a national title.

What needs to change? I’m not educated enough on the intricacies of Duke basketball to know. They’re getting the best players, keeping up in the NIL era. I know a ton of those fans want Scheyer gone, but that ain’t happening (this year). It’s not a comfortable position for them to be.

All we can say with certainty is that Duke right now is far closer to a Kentucky -- last title in 2012, no championship game berths since 2014 -- than a UConn, the new-blood that’s threatening to lap the field.