Baylor the kind of NCAA tourney test Duke has struggled to handle — but was built to pass

Tyrese Proctor remembers. He remembers the feeling of the second-round loss to Tennessee two years ago. He remembers losing to N.C. State a game from the Final Four last spring. He knows just how perilous the path is.

Baylor, Duke’s second-round opponent Sunday, has a lot in common with those teams. It’s a stiff test from a battle-tested opponent full of familiar faces. With two ACC championships and an Elite Eight in three seasons since Scheyer took over for Mike Krzyzewski, a lot has gone right for Duke — but Baylor is exactly the kind of test Duke has yet to pass in the NCAA tournament under Jon Scheyer.

“It’s something I keep in the back of my mind, because I’ve been through it,” Proctor, the veteran Duke guard, said Saturday within the unfamiliar confines of N.C. State’s locker room at the Lenovo Center. “I was a part of those teams that lost to those teams. I use it as motivation and giving out as information to the other guys, what it felt like and the aftermath of it. It’s something that I don’t want to go through again. I think it’s fueling me and the rest of our team.”

That doesn’t mean that Scheyer hasn’t learned from those games, nor Duke, or that the sins of its predecessors will be visited on this very different group. It does mean that there’s one glaring unchecked box on Scheyer’s postseason resume that the Baylor game would check.

In Scheyer’s first season, the Blue Devils were famously outmuscled by Tennessee in the second round. Last year, they benefited from James Madison’s first-round upset and beat top-seeded Houston after the Cougars lost their best player to injury. Then they lost to N.C. State for the second time in 17 days.

But Baylor is no pushover, perhaps not a vintage Baylor team but a hardened Big 12 squad nonetheless, with two players who know Duke all too well — Jeremy Roach, no introduction needed, and former Miami center Norchad Omier — and a freshman who might be winning a lot of the rookie awards Flagg has collected if Flagg weren’t collecting them, in V.J. Edgecombe.

Given the ACC’s tournament performance, with only Duke making it out of the first round proper, it’s fair to ask just how much the Blue Devils were really pushed in ACC play, although they certainly upped the difficulty in Charlotte by winning without Flagg and Maliq Brown.

But Duke absolutely thumped Illinois in February, beat Auburn at home and Arizona on the road, and the early losses to Kansas and Kentucky could be categorized as learning experiences for a team that wasn’t the finished product then that it is now.

It’s also a very different team, built to address the fatal flaws of seasons past. The team that lost to Tennessee was offensively challenged at times; the team that lost to N.C. State was undersized and, at times, soft — provoking a series of difficult offseason conversations that saw five players depart to play elsewhere. Scheyer wanted a different kind of team. And he got it.

“Hard truths,” Duke assistant coach Chris Carrawell said. “And that’s growth, to have those conversations. He didn’t back down and stayed steadfast with what he wanted it to look like.”

Accordingly, this group has very little in common with its predecessors, built with versatility in mind to make the most of Flagg’s ability to play and defend multiple positions. The transfers — Sion James, Mason Gillis, Brown — could all fill multiple roles and were all 6-6 or taller. So were the freshmen, guards and forwards alike, with 7-foot-2 Khaman Maluach as the rim protector Duke lacked a year ago.

“Honestly, this team is kind of a combination for me of year one and year two,” Scheyer said. “Year one, we were really long, big. We couldn’t really score as well as the typical team that we’ve coached. Year two we could really score, but we were undersized.

“For us, there’s a clear vision to me and a plan of how we were going to put together this team, starting with Cooper. When you have him and his versatility, it allows you to do other things maybe you couldn’t do with the roster.”

Still, there’s absolutely no question the Blue Devils — this team, and Scheyer — still have something to prove. It certainly seems like the lessons of the previous seasons have been fully learned. Beating Baylor would offer the proof.

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This story was originally published March 22, 2025 at 4:27 PM with the headline "Baylor the kind of NCAA tourney test Duke has struggled to handle — but was built to pass."

Luke DeCock

The News & Observer

Luke DeCock is a former journalist for the News & Observer.