There will be no back-to-back runs to the Final Four for the Alabama Crimson Tide, who fell 85-65 to the No. 1 Duke Blue Devils in the East Region final of the 2025 NCAA Tournament on Saturday night at Prudential Center in Newark, N.J.
Duke (35-3 overall) cut down the nets after getting 21 points from Kon Knueppel, 17 from Tyrese Proctor and 16 from freshman star Cooper Flagg in a resounding victory over the Crimson Tide (28-9) in the Elite Eight. The Blue Devils led from start to finish, and their 20-point lead as the final buzzer sounded was their largest of the game.
Two nights after putting up a blistering 25 3-pointers against No. 6 seed BYU, an NCAA Tournament record, Alabama connected on just eight shots from beyond the arc against powerhouse Duke. Labaron Philon, perhaps playing his final in a Crimson Tide uniform ahead of the 2025 NBA Draft, led Alabama with 16 points on 4-of-9 shooting. Chris Youngblood added 10 points.
In their final games at Alabama, Mark Sears was held to six points on 2-of-12 from the floor and Grant Nelson had 10 points and seven rebounds.
After the game, Alabama coach Nate Oats met with the media in Newark to discuss his team's season-ending loss in the Elite Eight and what went wrong for the Crimson Tide against Duke. Here's everything Oats said in his postgame remarks.
Nate Oats' opening statement after Alabama fell to top-ranked Duke basketball
"Obviously a tough night for us. Duke obviously had a big part to do with that. They're a great team. They've got great players. Coaching staff did a good job getting them ready. Only one team is going to end up cutting the nets down in San Antonio. It won't be us this year.
"I told our guys, we've raised this program to a level where the standard's really high. Ninety-nine percent of college basketball players would trade places with these guys with the year we had, but we're disappointed. We had bigger goals, and it's disappointing to go out like we went out. But I thought our guys stayed together. They kept playing hard. Just, Duke was good. We didn't do a good job attacking their switching on defense. We shot 34 percent -- or we shot 35, they shot 54. It's hard to overcome that, and you get out-rebounded 11-2.
"We had said kind of coming into the off-season that if we have a tough shooting night -- and two years ago, when we were the No. 1 overall seed, I think we shot 3 of 27 from three and lost. But we had gotten 20 O-boards. We've got to figure out ways to win when we don't shoot it well. The offensive rebounding was a big one that we kind of said we need to be elite at, get to the free-throw line. We didn't do (that) well, I didn't think. We got to the free-throw line a fair amount, but it was not enough.
"The O-boards, yeah, they made more free throws than we shot, so we didn't get to the free-throw line enough. And the O-boards, we had 10, but they outscored us in second-chance points. We didn't really score off the O-boards. Grant was the only guy on our team with more than one O-board. We've got to get better. We obviously played really well two nights ago, and it's tough within 48 hours from playing as well as we did to playing as poorly as we did. That's how the NCAA Tournament works in a one-game elimination tournament. You play poorly and you get sent home, and that's what happened.
"Duke's as good a team as ...
