Closure on Duke

March Through Madness

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Mark Coatney

Devin Gordon

Mark Starr

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Though it's March Madness, We Know April is the Coolest Month

1:17 PM, April 1, 2008 | Comments (0)

March gets all the ink, and the fancy "Madness" nickname, but as a top-to-bottom sports fan, I'm finding myself much more partial to April. We get the Final Four and the national title game, then the Masters just a few days later. And wrapped all around...

The Ivies Muscle Up

4:12 PM, March 28, 2008 | Comments (0)

Teams to Root for--and Against

11:11 AM, March 27, 2008 | Comments (0)

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Devin Gordon

Now that my self-imposed 24-hour exile from the tournament is over, I think I can safely revisit Duke's loss yesterday to West Virginia without breaking any furniture. We lost for two reasons that won't be a surprise to anyone who's been reading what we've written about Duke over the past week: 1) we had a ghastly shooting game, missing 15 straight three-pointers during a cold stretch that covered the middle 30 minutes of the game, and 2) DeMarcus Nelson, our senior captain, had another disastrous performance. All things considered, we're lucky it wasn't a blowout.

I watched the game with my closest friend from Duke, the one who called me out for not backing up my verbal assault on Nelson early Friday morning with raw data. He thought I was overreacting, until he looked at Nelson's numbers and they were worse than either of us thought. Well, my pal thought that if anything, DeMarcus was even worse on Saturday.

Its a mystery to me what happened to this team down the stretch. This will sound like the grumblings of a sore loser, but West Virginia is not a particularly great team. They played an excellent game yesterday, but still only scratched past us, despite a Duke shooting performance that was about as bad as I've ever seen. Maybe it was just bad luck, and as I've said all along, Duke is a team without a Plan B so when the shots don't fall, we're bound to lose. But I think Duke's tourney meltdown was also a failure of leadership. The captain is supposed to set the tone for his team, and Nelson did just that. When you see your leader lose all semblance of control, it can't help but have a ripple effect on the troops. Plus, its not like you can just bench your captain or stop giving him the ball. You gotta dance with who brung ya. And for us, every offensive possession yesterday that went through Nelson, almost without exception, was a squandered possession.

Duke fans are looking forward next year to a team that runs through different players--Gerald Henderson, the silver lining to one awfully dark cloud; Jon Scheyer, who was the headiest player on the court for us and should've gotten more touches that he did; and Kyle Singler, who vanished in the tournament and will have to do better next time.

We're also looking forward to having our coach back on the job full time. Its one of the least covered, and most logical, explanations for Duke's recent swoon. College hoops is a murderous job for even the best coaches, but for two years now Mike Krzyzewski is dividing his time between Duke and Team USA, which will play for gold medals in Beijing this summer, and his college team seems less prepared as a result during crunch time. Personally, I'm still fine with K's decision--he's earned the right, and its a worthy cause. All the same, I think most Duke fans, like me, are starting to wonder how much longer we can survive his divided attention.

UCLA would seem to have a clear path to the Final Four now, but a word of caution to Bruins fans, who are probably still sweating from that A&M game: there's no such thing as a clear path. Play just lousy enough, and anyone halfway decent will send you home.

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