Duke women have gone from top 25 to bottoming out. Can Blue Devils save their season?
N.C. State is barreling down the tracks toward another No. 1 seed, North Carolina has already secured its first 20-win season in seven years and as recently as a month ago Duke was right there in the conversation with them.
In the space of six weeks, Duke has gone from 16th to 21st to also receiving votes to not receiving votes to being at dire risk of missing the NCAA women’s tournament entirely.
With a 67-51 senior-night loss to Boston College on Thursday, their seventh loss in the past 10 games, the Blue Devils now face nothing but must-wins, Sunday at North Carolina and in Greensboro after that.
Thursday shaped up as a one-game referendum on the ACC’s final tournament team. In ESPN’s latest bracketology, Duke and Boston College were among the final eight teams into the field, very much on a razor’s edge. A win would not only have been a sign that Duke’s swoon was over but offered some cushion heading into the ACC tournament.
Instead, the Blue Devils are 16-11, 7-9 in the ACC and in deep trouble.
“Obviously it’s tough and it’s hard,” Duke guard Celeste Taylor said. “We’re not out there to lose.”
It all went so wrong, so fast. After winning eight of their first nine games, with the sole loss to top-ranked South Carolina, the ACC season has been a long up-and-down slog, and over the past month, mostly down. It wasn’t just that Duke hasn’t been able to beat good teams, like UNC and Louisville and Georgia Tech and N.C. State. The Blue Devils also managed to lose to last-place Virginia, accounting for half of the Cavaliers’ ACC wins.
There’s a lot that factors into that, injuries and slumping stars and more, but in the end, this clearly isn’t the same Duke team to end the season that it was to start the season. It’s a grim picture.
“What I will say is, when we play disciplined and when we play connected, we’re pretty good,” Duke coach Kara Lawson said. “When we’re undisciplined, we’re not. I think that’s the difference. I don’t know about any of the other stuff. We just haven’t been as disciplined the last couple weeks.”
The Blue Devils would need to find four wins somewhere to avoid finishing with less than 20 for only the fourth time in the past 28 years. Two of those came in the final two years under Joanne P. McCallie, which is why Lawson is here, but it’s also clear at this point there’s not going to be an immediate return to prominence, despite the promising early returns this season.
This was Boston College’s first win at Cameron as an ACC team, the only other coming before any of the players on the floor Thursday night were born.
“It is cool to be a part of history,” Eagles guard Makayla Dickens said.
That’s not the kind of history Duke hoped to be making this season.
There’s still time to change that, just not much. A win at North Carolina would be a potential season-saver. So would a long run in Greensboro. The Blue Devils have shown they’re capable of better than this, and shown it this season. Can they show it again before it’s too late?
This story was originally published February 25, 2022 at 6:10 AM.
