Duke Moves Into Title Favorite With Gritty, March-Like Win Over Top-Ranked Michigan

WASHINGTON — The calendar said Feb. 21, but everything else said it was March.

The matchup said so, just hours after the NCAA men’s basketball selection committee anointed Michigan as the No. 1 overall seed coming into Saturday’s historic slate of games and Duke just fractionally behind them at No. 2 on their overall list of the 16 best teams so far this season.

The analytics did, too, with KenPom labeling the Wolverines and Blue Devils as the top-two teams in the country thanks to the rare combination of assembling together two top-10 offenses with two top-10 defenses by just about every metric you can rely on.

The 20,537 full-throated fans who stuffed the upper reaches of Capital One Arena for the highest-attended neutral-site college basketball game this season did so as well. They weren’t there on a whim to take things in either, with get-in prices nearly 25 times what would get them in the doors to see the professional basketball team that calls the place home 24 hours later.

Mostly though, everything leading up to Duke’s 68–63 victory over Michigan confirmed such a date change before it was actually time to rip off the latest page on everybody’s wall calendar to unveil the month where college basketball steps into the spotlight.

“That felt like a March or April game,” said a smirking Blue Devils coach Jon Scheyer. “It was a big-time game where our guys were ready to compete at a high level. The eight guys that played—the starting group obviously did a lot of really good things—but I thought just the way they [all] stepped up was huge.”

It’s not often that a marquee nonconference game, perhaps the one of this 2025–26 campaign, takes place just hours before an approaching nor’easter is set to dump several feet of snow on the nation’s capital. It’s rarer, even at the upcoming home to the East Regional in four weeks, one has the ethos of survive and advance when the calendar says this is only a temporary break from conference play.

Yet that is exactly what transpired. Thrilling back-and-forth runs gave way to far more tense scoring droughts that made every bucket worth more than Duke’s 1.15 points per possession in a game where neither side even sniffed a double-digit lead.

There were general doubts about this Duke team’s ultimate ceiling despite its, now, nine wins over ranked opponents and a lofty record with two losses by a combined four points. Much of that has to do with who isn’t on the floor from last year’s Final Four run—No. 1 overall pick Cooper Flagg and fellow NBA Rookie of the Year front-runner Kon Knueppel, who sat courtside on Saturday—than who was in national player of the year candidate Cameron Boozer. Perhaps some of that can also be attributed to the way they have let a handful of leads slip away in the second half this season or the still fresh trauma of falling to rival North Carolina in a contest they memorably led for every second but the last.

But after Saturday night’s performance, those doubts can recede. This group is capable of being the favorite to cut down the nets in Indianapolis after consistently coming up with an answer to every punch their fellow heavyweight threw at them.

“We made some timely errors, and when you’re playing someone like Duke, they make you pay for every mistake,” Michigan coach Dusty May said. “When you’re in these slugfests, you’re just out of your offensive rhythm and you don’t have the fresh legs.”

Indeed, this was no effortless blowout Michigan had been accustomed to in building up a résumé to prove it was capable of breaking the Big Ten’s 26-year title drought.

The Wolverines trailed for just the sixth time this season at halftime and suffered their first loss while doing so, frittering away a first-half effort where they shot 52% from the field and do-everything star Yaxel Lendeborg scored 16 of his game-high 21 points. Stalwart center Aday Mara was as close to a nonfactor down the stretch, too, picking up his third foul with seven minutes to play in the first half and just 39 seconds after being subbed on in a gamble that backfired spectacularly. The coaching staff rotated far more than they normally have this season to find something that could help close a deficit that never flipped in the final 23 minutes of action.

“This team, defensively, is a lot better than everybody else in the Big Ten,” Lendeborg said. “We competed out there. You know, the environment is something we got to get used to as well because we have hopes of making it to the national championship game so it’s going to be just like this.”

Duke also wasn’t quite as sharp, but still hustled to make every play that mattered to eke out the victory. The Blue Devils scored on every trip down the floor in the final three minutes and had seven more second-chance points in a game that could have been a seven-point margin had Isaiah Evans’s (14 points) thunderous dunk come a fraction of a second sooner than the final buzzer to count.

Most notable of all, the Blue Devils outrebounded the Wolverines 41–28 and were so effective at cleaning up in the paint with putbacks and tip-ins that Lendeborg even admitted his teammates were telling each other not to allow any more close touches for the first time since he arrived on campus.

“That was something that we really focused on coming into the game,” Boozer said. “They’re a great rebounding team, but so are we. Their numbers, analytics-wise, whatever you have, we’re pretty even. We wanted to attack, have confidence on the glass.”

It helps to have someone like Boozer, too, who did nothing but enhance his quest to clean up awards season just as Flagg did as a freshman last year. Though he wasn’t the scorer that he has been at times in pouring in 20 or 30 a night, he was incredibly efficient at making the right play at the right time. With his dad, Carlos Boozer, jumping around courtside in support, the Duke big man needed just 10 attempts from the field to score 18 points and came awfully close to a triple-double in collecting 10 rebounds and seven assists.

Not bad given that he had a long stretch late in the second half where he sat on the bench and played the final 8 ½ minutes with four fouls.

“It’s not as though they don’t have really good players coming in,” May quipped. “When Boozer goes out, you’ve got to figure out a way to capitalize, and we weren’t able to do that for a number of reasons.”

“Having four fouls is not something you think about at that time,” Boozer said. “My mind is: Make a winning play. I felt like I did that tonight and if I do that, my talent, my game’s going to show. That’s what makes me great.”

Veteran Duke observers may have understood such greatness to be the case with Boozer in particular, but were unsure whether or not it extended to the rest of his supporting cast.

After a game which feels simply like the front end of a two-game series, perhaps they’re coming around.

“Obviously we want the best seed and more optimality across the board. But it’s over now. Am I glad we lost? No,” May said. “I do think this will prepare us better for the NCAA tournament. Whether it’s a first-round game or a Sweet 16 or whatever the case, if we’re fortunate to be in one of those. This environment prepares us, this one has a different feel than a lot of the games we’ve played in this year.”

Feels like March all right, which is all the more proof that Duke is again a threat when the calendar finally says that for real.

More College Basketball from Sports Illustrated

Listen to SI’s college sports podcast, Others Receiving Votes, below or on Apple and Spotify. Watch the show on SI’s YouTube channel.