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DURHAM The Charlotte 49ers got embarrassed Tuesday night in a place where hundreds of college basketball teams have been embarrassed before them.
Charlotte coach Bobby Lutz had called three timeouts by the time Duke's eventual 101-59 win against the 49ers was 10 minutes old. In all three, he huddled his players and asked a version of the same question.
"Where's my team?" he said. "I'm looking for my team right now!"
The 49ers were out there somewhere. But they were flustered, panicky and stuck in the mire - another saber-toothed tiger, rendered toothless by the La Brea Tar Pits of college hoops.
No.9 Duke whipped Charlotte by 42 in Cameron Indoor Stadium, and it could have been worse.
Even when something went right for Charlotte (2-1), it usually went wrong. On the game's first possession, the 49ers had a nice play set up thanks to something they saw on film.
They planned to take advantage of the way the Blue Devils overplay the wing with a backdoor layup.
Charlotte point guard Dijuan Harris ran it perfectly. His bounce pass to a cutting Rashad Coleman beat the entire Duke defense, and it only remained for Coleman to catch the ball and lay it up.
Unfortunately, Coleman fumbled the ball out of bounds.
"Maybe if we had made that shot it would kind of have gotten us going," Harris said.
Instead, within minutes it was 17-4, Duke. Then 39-17. Then 57-24 - with three minutes still left in the first half.
"We're young," Lutz said. "We might have been slightly intimidated."
No doubt. That is not surprising, of course. Duke had done this before in Cameron. Hundreds of times.
That was Duke's NCAA-best 71st straight win against a nonconference foe at home. If the Blue Devils aren't playing a team with ACC-caliber talent, they never lose here.
For the 49ers, only bulky forward Shamari Spears (20 points) looked like an ACC player Tuesday. That's for good reason. He used to be one before transferring from Boston College. Everyone else - including Harris, the generally reliable point guard who must play well for the 49ers to win - seemed lost. Harris called Duke "very overwhelming."
Said Spears, who had unsuccessfully tried to warn his teammates beforehand of what was coming since he had played at Duke before: "That was not Charlotte basketball."
It was Duke basketball. The Blue Devils looked like the Top-10 team and Final Four threat they are.
This wasn't exactly a high-profile game for Duke. There were a few swatches of empty seats in Cameron's upper bowl. The hardest-core student fans only had to line up at 2:30 p.m. for the 6 p.m. tip-off to obtain front-row seats.
For all the nastiness the 49ers suffered through Tuesday, they certainly have more talent than last season's 11-20 debacle.
Spears might be an all-conference player. Harris was bad Tuesday, but he's one of the better point guards in the Atlantic 10. Those two are surrounded by a number of decent role players, most of whom can shoot the three.
It was hard to remember that Tuesday, though, as the 49ers sank into oblivion.
"Hopefully," Lutz said, "this is the low point of the season."
