Cooper Flagg, Duke left devastated after dream season turns into nightmare with stunning Final Four collapse

SAN ANTONIO — Eyes focused, knees bent, Cooper Flagg held the ball on the wing and waited for the ideal moment to attack.

He had one chance to erase a one-point deficit, one chance to preserve Duke’s flickering title hopes, one chance to erase the memory of a stunning late-game collapse.

At first, Flagg drove left and got Houston’s J’Wan Roberts on his hip, but a help defender stepped into his path. Flagg then backed Roberts down, turned over his left shoulder and used his off hand to create some space. The short pull-up jumper that Flagg attempted is one that he has hit dozens of times this season. This time, he clanked it off the front rim, sending the Houston fans in the Alamodome into a state of red delirium and leaving his star-laden Duke team shattered and shell-shocked.

When asked to describe that sequence after Duke’s 70-67 Final Four loss, Flagg said that the Blue Devils executed the play head coach Jon Scheyer drew up.

“Took it into the paint, thought I got my feet set, rose up,” Flagg said. “Left it short obviously, but it’s a shot I’m willing to live with in that scenario.”

Outside Duke’s locker room, Scheyer offered similar thoughts.

“For the rest of my life, I'll have no regrets with No. 2 with the ball 6 feet from the basket,” he said.

When Duke looks back on the loss that extinguished its national title hopes, it won’t be Flagg’s miss that reverberates through their minds. They’ll blame the flurry of mistakes that allowed Houston to relentlessly scratch its way back from deficits of 59-45 with 8:17 left, 64-55 with 3:03 left and 67-61 with less than a minute to go.

It started innocently enough, a blown box-out here, a sloppy turnover there. Houston kicked open the door a little further with a key defensive stop after Kelvin Sampson bravely chose not to foul while still down six. Then Flagg and Sion James made a pivotal mistake. They miscommunicated on how to defend a ball screen on Houston’s ensuing possession, leaving Emanuel Sharp wide open for a right-wing 3-pointer that cut the deficit to three with 33 seconds remaining.

“Once we hit that 3, now there’s game pressure,” Sampson said.

And the Blue Devils, accustomed to being ahead by 20-plus for so much of this season, did not respond well to it.

Sampson put JoJo Tugler on the ball on the ensuing inbound pass, hoping that the sophomore could use his 7-foot-6 wingspan to force a turnover. Sampson swears that Houston should have gotten a five-second call before a Duke timeout, except “the referee was counting so slow.”

Duke aided Houston's quest for a turnover by seemingly running the same inbound play over and over. That helped Mylik Wilson knock ...