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I learned to root against Duke before I learned to root for anyone. That's one of the major reasons I became a UConn fan. I was fairly young, and the 1999 tournament became my introduction to college basketball. And it was actually Gonzaga, not UConn, that captivated me that year (I don't even remember whether I actually watched the games; just my grandfather, who was fairly into college basketball, telling me about it). Gonzaga was a true Cinderella - a small school, in the middle of nowhere, that had just one previous tournament appearance to its name in its entire history.
That team, as I'm sure most of you know, ended up being eliminated in the elite eight by the eventual champion, UConn. At the time, though, no one knew it'd be the eventual champion. That was supposed to be Duke.
I didn't even watch the title game. I don't think I was even aware there was a game. But I remember the reactions. There were a lot of reactions, even from the people in my life who didn't care that much about the sport, or really any sport. I think there was a novelty factor with a team from Connecticut winning a national title, but more than anything it was the surprise factor. You can't fake that.
I think it's very easy, in retrospect, to underrate or understate the magnitude of the original Duke-UConn upset - especially if you weren't there. Both were 1-seeds. One team was 37-1, the other team was 34-2. To this day, many on this board insist that the 9.5 they were getting was way too many; that the two teams were actually pretty evenly matched.
But it doesn't matter what this board thinks. The number was 9.5, and given how Duke had looked at times, I'm guessing there were at least as many who expected Duke to cover. To put that into perspective, consider that there have only been four similar upsets in the last three tournaments combined. We've had many championship mismatches since then (UNC-MSU in '09, Kentucky-Kansas in '12, UConn-SDSU, etc.), and yet none of them have touched 9.5. This was seismic. Many would have regarded '99 Duke as the best team of the modern era had it won that game like it should have.
Then there's '04, which isn't remembered so much for the scale of the upset (UConn was actually favored despite being the lower seed), but for the scale of the choke. I vividly remember Emeka Okafor standing at the free throw line to shoot a one-and-one with 3:15 on the clock and UConn trailing 75-67. "He needs to hit this," I thought. He missed.
Even I could do the math. With the shot clock being 35 seconds in those days, UConn basically needed to throw a perfect game the rest of the way just to give itself a chance. Then, for some reason, Luol Deng hoists a three with ten seconds left on the shot clock. JJ Redick inexplicably chases the rebound from the far corner and lets his man, Rashad Anderson, leak out in transition. Five seconds later, Rashad drills a three from the right corner. Next possession, Daniel Ewing launches a contested two from the far baseline - a shot that would have been considered obviously stupid even before analytics. Ben Gordon scoops up the long rebound and gets fouled about three seconds later after beating most of the Duke team down the floor. Now it's 75-72. Duke has essentially allowed UConn to score five points in less than ten seconds of possession, all the while leaving about 25 combined seconds on the shot clock by taking terrible shots. A decent high school team could have handled the situation better.
The full sequence from the time Emeka missed the one-and-one to when Duhon banked in the meaningless three (not if you were a bettor, I know): Stop. Made three. Stop. Made free throws. Stop. Made two. Stop. Made two. Stop. Made free throws. Stop. Made free throw.
UConn won ELEVEN consecutive possessions to end that game.
And so as I watched Sunday's game, all I could think about was '99 and especially '04 (clearly I think about those games a lot judging by my handle). And when Mullins' shot cleared the net, I couldn't believe I had just watched something that had pretty clearly eclipsed both of them.
It didn't even really occur to me until after the postgame euphoria began to subside that '04 was TWENTY-TWO YEARS AGO. Most of today's students barely remember 2014, much less 2004, 1999, or anything prior to that. Sadly, I'd be willing to bet that we've lost far more fans from that era than we've gained modern day fans who understand what those games meant. But that's life. It has to make the originals here grateful, at least by boneyard standards, that they've lived long enough to now experience multiple generations of dominance. I know it makes them feel old.
It does annoy me a bit, though, to see the media frame this as just another chapter in the great UConn/Duke rivalry, as if all five tournament meetings were created equal. It's not a rivalry. That'd be like comparing three first degree murder charges with an aggravated assault and a public intoxication. UConn was hardly a bug on Duke's windshield when it won the title in '91. That team was an 11-seed and probably wouldn't have made the sweet 16 with a less favorable draw. 1990 I'll give them - that was a classic game between two really good teams that at the time was maybe the biggest heartbreaker in program history. But they didn't win the title. No one was winning that title, besides UNLV. UConn, meanwhile, snatched hardware right out of Duke's hands - twice. The first time was in the title game, and the second time was the de facto title game. Any Duke fan over 35 despises UConn - and that was BEFORE Sunday.
We'll see whether this one leads to hardware, but boy was it gruesome. It was so, so gruesome. Even putting the 19-point blown lead aside, that final sequence alone - with little Boozer turning the ball over and then Mullens splashing one from the logo - required a 1 in 100 type miracle. And it fits so nicely into a 15 second video or a picture frame or an iphone reaction clip. That's going to provide the program valuable exposure for decades to come.
The older I get, I find myself caring less about wins and losses and more about moments, stories, and athletic justice. I want to see something I haven't seen before - something that makes me feel like a kid again, that bonds me with the younger generation of fans in the same way Langdon tripping bonded me with the older ones. Those moments become memories which gradually become the language you speak and the culture you represent. Every sports fan gets that. It's like a 24 hour reprieve from all your problems. It's an excuse to text some random guy you haven't seen in 15 years, someone whose number you only held onto because you knew he hated Duke. No 'how you doing, how you been?' just straight to the point: "you see that?" I don't need to identify myself. He only knows one guy who's this much of an extremist.
I'm sure many of you strongly prefer the less stressful version of success that we saw in '23 and '24, but those were anomalies. There's something about winning one you weren't supposed win. There's something about surviving. If the Hurley era was lacking anything, it was a signature moment. Now he has one, and it's (potentially) better than anyone else's.
We'll have plenty of time to debate where the Mullins shot ranks historically in comparison to the Laettners and the Chalmers' and the Jenkins', but one thing we can all agree on is that the farther UConn goes, the higher it will rank. And, given the stakes, the circumstances, and the distance, I think it has a pretty good case to be #1 if they can finish the deal. That's crazy.
What are their chances of doing that? Well, you can take the glass half empty view and say they needed a miracle to beat Duke, or you could take the glass half full view and say they beat the #1 overall seed despite shooting just 5-23 from three, allowing a season worst 52.1% mark from the field, and missing several critical free throws down the stretch. Duke also shot it well from three, albeit on a small volume of attempts (6-15), and got a very strong effort out of likely NPOY, Cam Boozer (27-8-4). UConn likely won't see an offensive player that good again.
Evidence also continues to mount that UConn's just a better team than they showed in Big East play. Their current KenPom net rating is 29.11, good for 9th nationally. But if you took the net rating from only their nine noteworthy non-conference games, that shoots up to around 34.1 - just about identical to Illinois and within shouting distance of Michigan and Arizona.
Winning the title will still likely require them to win two games as an underdog, against at least one Big Ten team, smack in the middle of Big Ten territory. That's a tall task. But they have a shot - a much better one than they did to erase a 19-point deficit against the possible best team in the country. I don't think anyone wants to bet against them at this point.
That team, as I'm sure most of you know, ended up being eliminated in the elite eight by the eventual champion, UConn. At the time, though, no one knew it'd be the eventual champion. That was supposed to be Duke.
I didn't even watch the title game. I don't think I was even aware there was a game. But I remember the reactions. There were a lot of reactions, even from the people in my life who didn't care that much about the sport, or really any sport. I think there was a novelty factor with a team from Connecticut winning a national title, but more than anything it was the surprise factor. You can't fake that.
I think it's very easy, in retrospect, to underrate or understate the magnitude of the original Duke-UConn upset - especially if you weren't there. Both were 1-seeds. One team was 37-1, the other team was 34-2. To this day, many on this board insist that the 9.5 they were getting was way too many; that the two teams were actually pretty evenly matched.
But it doesn't matter what this board thinks. The number was 9.5, and given how Duke had looked at times, I'm guessing there were at least as many who expected Duke to cover. To put that into perspective, consider that there have only been four similar upsets in the last three tournaments combined. We've had many championship mismatches since then (UNC-MSU in '09, Kentucky-Kansas in '12, UConn-SDSU, etc.), and yet none of them have touched 9.5. This was seismic. Many would have regarded '99 Duke as the best team of the modern era had it won that game like it should have.
Then there's '04, which isn't remembered so much for the scale of the upset (UConn was actually favored despite being the lower seed), but for the scale of the choke. I vividly remember Emeka Okafor standing at the free throw line to shoot a one-and-one with 3:15 on the clock and UConn trailing 75-67. "He needs to hit this," I thought. He missed.
Even I could do the math. With the shot clock being 35 seconds in those days, UConn basically needed to throw a perfect game the rest of the way just to give itself a chance. Then, for some reason, Luol Deng hoists a three with ten seconds left on the shot clock. JJ Redick inexplicably chases the rebound from the far corner and lets his man, Rashad Anderson, leak out in transition. Five seconds later, Rashad drills a three from the right corner. Next possession, Daniel Ewing launches a contested two from the far baseline - a shot that would have been considered obviously stupid even before analytics. Ben Gordon scoops up the long rebound and gets fouled about three seconds later after beating most of the Duke team down the floor. Now it's 75-72. Duke has essentially allowed UConn to score five points in less than ten seconds of possession, all the while leaving about 25 combined seconds on the shot clock by taking terrible shots. A decent high school team could have handled the situation better.
The full sequence from the time Emeka missed the one-and-one to when Duhon banked in the meaningless three (not if you were a bettor, I know): Stop. Made three. Stop. Made free throws. Stop. Made two. Stop. Made two. Stop. Made free throws. Stop. Made free throw.
UConn won ELEVEN consecutive possessions to end that game.
And so as I watched Sunday's game, all I could think about was '99 and especially '04 (clearly I think about those games a lot judging by my handle). And when Mullins' shot cleared the net, I couldn't believe I had just watched something that had pretty clearly eclipsed both of them.
It didn't even really occur to me until after the postgame euphoria began to subside that '04 was TWENTY-TWO YEARS AGO. Most of today's students barely remember 2014, much less 2004, 1999, or anything prior to that. Sadly, I'd be willing to bet that we've lost far more fans from that era than we've gained modern day fans who understand what those games meant. But that's life. It has to make the originals here grateful, at least by boneyard standards, that they've lived long enough to now experience multiple generations of dominance. I know it makes them feel old.
It does annoy me a bit, though, to see the media frame this as just another chapter in the great UConn/Duke rivalry, as if all five tournament meetings were created equal. It's not a rivalry. That'd be like comparing three first degree murder charges with an aggravated assault and a public intoxication. UConn was hardly a bug on Duke's windshield when it won the title in '91. That team was an 11-seed and probably wouldn't have made the sweet 16 with a less favorable draw. 1990 I'll give them - that was a classic game between two really good teams that at the time was maybe the biggest heartbreaker in program history. But they didn't win the title. No one was winning that title, besides UNLV. UConn, meanwhile, snatched hardware right out of Duke's hands - twice. The first time was in the title game, and the second time was the de facto title game. Any Duke fan over 35 despises UConn - and that was BEFORE Sunday.
We'll see whether this one leads to hardware, but boy was it gruesome. It was so, so gruesome. Even putting the 19-point blown lead aside, that final sequence alone - with little Boozer turning the ball over and then Mullens splashing one from the logo - required a 1 in 100 type miracle. And it fits so nicely into a 15 second video or a picture frame or an iphone reaction clip. That's going to provide the program valuable exposure for decades to come.
The older I get, I find myself caring less about wins and losses and more about moments, stories, and athletic justice. I want to see something I haven't seen before - something that makes me feel like a kid again, that bonds me with the younger generation of fans in the same way Langdon tripping bonded me with the older ones. Those moments become memories which gradually become the language you speak and the culture you represent. Every sports fan gets that. It's like a 24 hour reprieve from all your problems. It's an excuse to text some random guy you haven't seen in 15 years, someone whose number you only held onto because you knew he hated Duke. No 'how you doing, how you been?' just straight to the point: "you see that?" I don't need to identify myself. He only knows one guy who's this much of an extremist.
I'm sure many of you strongly prefer the less stressful version of success that we saw in '23 and '24, but those were anomalies. There's something about winning one you weren't supposed win. There's something about surviving. If the Hurley era was lacking anything, it was a signature moment. Now he has one, and it's (potentially) better than anyone else's.
We'll have plenty of time to debate where the Mullins shot ranks historically in comparison to the Laettners and the Chalmers' and the Jenkins', but one thing we can all agree on is that the farther UConn goes, the higher it will rank. And, given the stakes, the circumstances, and the distance, I think it has a pretty good case to be #1 if they can finish the deal. That's crazy.
What are their chances of doing that? Well, you can take the glass half empty view and say they needed a miracle to beat Duke, or you could take the glass half full view and say they beat the #1 overall seed despite shooting just 5-23 from three, allowing a season worst 52.1% mark from the field, and missing several critical free throws down the stretch. Duke also shot it well from three, albeit on a small volume of attempts (6-15), and got a very strong effort out of likely NPOY, Cam Boozer (27-8-4). UConn likely won't see an offensive player that good again.
Evidence also continues to mount that UConn's just a better team than they showed in Big East play. Their current KenPom net rating is 29.11, good for 9th nationally. But if you took the net rating from only their nine noteworthy non-conference games, that shoots up to around 34.1 - just about identical to Illinois and within shouting distance of Michigan and Arizona.
Winning the title will still likely require them to win two games as an underdog, against at least one Big Ten team, smack in the middle of Big Ten territory. That's a tall task. But they have a shot - a much better one than they did to erase a 19-point deficit against the possible best team in the country. I don't think anyone wants to bet against them at this point.
