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Duke’s March Madness run ended on Sunday at the Elite Eight, and what an ending it was. The Blue Devils blew a 15-point halftime lead, coughed up the ball in the final seconds and watched UConn’s Braylon Mullins boot them out of the NCAA tournament.
It was a painful loss, but it has company in Duke’s oeuvre of embarrassing March Madness exits. This is a very proud program that has seen some of the best NBA prospects of the past decade come through its doors, with no title to show for it since they won it all in 2015 under Mike Krzyzewski.
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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’ worst NCAA tournament losses in the past 11 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.
6. No. 2 Duke vs. No. 7 South Carolina, 2017 second round
Leading scorers: Jayson Tatum, Luke Kennard
Tatum, Kennard and Grayson Allen have gone on to enjoy successful NBA careers, but their time together in college was less than ideal.
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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 freshmen 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.
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5. No. 4 Duke vs. No. 11 NC State, 2024 Elite Eight
Leading scorers: Kyle Filipowski, Jared McCain
From an NBA standpoint, this is probably 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 16 to set up what looked like an extremely favorable matchup to reach the Final Four.
NC State reached the tournament only because of an unprecedented ACC tournament run, which included a win over Duke. A repeat win for the overachieving Wolfpack was a tall order, right?
Right?
Duke has had better teams lose in the tournament, but there have been only 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.
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4. No. 1 Duke vs. No. 2 UConn, 2026 Elite Eight
Leading scorers: Cameron Boozer, Isaiah Evans
The No. 1 overall seed was at least courteous enough to give us some warning this March Madness run might not go as hoped. They needed comebacks to beat both No. 16 seed Siena and No. 5 seed St. John’s, with the former becoming the first No. 16 seed to hold a double-digit halftime lead over a No. 1 seed.
But Duke didn’t need a comeback to beat UConn. It just needed to hold on. Duke led by as many as 19 points in the first half, but Dan Hurley’s group just kept chipping away. Even then, though, Duke just had to hold onto the ball with 10 seconds left, instead of… this.
It was a mortifying collapse. But also not Duke’s most mortifying collapse of the past two years.
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3. No. 1 Duke vs. No. 2 Michigan State, 2019 Elite Eight
Leading scorers: Zion Williamson, R.J. Barrett
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 last year’s team of Cooper Flagg and Co., whom we could describe as similarly talented, made the Final Four.
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2. No. 1 Duke vs. No. 1 Houston, 2025 Final Four
Leading scorers: Cooper Flagg, Kon Knueppel
The best that can be said about last year’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 that 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.
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Instead, it got what would be an all-time worst loss for most programs. But not Duke.
1. No. 2 Duke vs. No. 8 UNC, 2022 Final Four
Leading scorers: Paolo Banchero, Wendell Moore Jr.
Let’s be real: Duke could have blown a 50-point lead on Sunday 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.
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There’s no beating that.
