College basketball fans were upset with a foul call on Cooper Flagg late in the Duke Blue Devils’ epic collapse against the Houston Cougars in the Final Four on Saturday night.
Duke was shooting free throws with 19.6 seconds left in the game and up one point. Guard Tyrese Proctor’s shot went off the rim and bounced toward Flagg. As the future NBA pro fought with two Houston players for the ball, a referee blew the whistle and called a loose-ball foul on Flagg.
J’Wan Roberts made two free throws to put Houston up one point. Duke missed a few shots down the stretch and the Cougars won the game 70-67 to advance to the national championship.
Duke and fans were left in disbelief.
"Got to give them a lot of credit for what they do every single night they play," Flagg said after the game. "We could have been a little bit more sharp down the stretch executing some things. At the end of the day, you got to give them a lot of credit, as well."
Houston closed the game on a 9-0 run in the final 33 seconds. Flagg had 27 points.
"Knowing going into that game that he was the player of the year, that he brought his team to the Final Four, we knew it would be challenging," Roberts said.
Blue Devils head coach Jon Scheyer lamented the collapse
"It’s heartbreaking, it’s incredibly disappointing," he said. "There’s a lot of pain that comes with this. That’s what the tournament is all about."
Houston will play Florida in the title game. The Cougars have never won a national championship.
The two preeminent coaches in women's college basketball will meet in Sunday's NCAA Division I women's basketball national championship game.
Geno Auriemma has coached UConn to 11 national titles, while South Carolina head coach Dawn Staley has led the Gamecocks to three championships – including the 2024 title. UConn and South Carolina will battle for the 2025 championship in Tampa, Florida, later Sunday.
Staley is one of college basketball's high-profile figures, and she has often shared her thoughts on whatever issue the sport may be contending with at a given moment. Amid the Gamecocks' pursuit of back-to-back national titles, Staley spoke out on the narratives surrounding UConn star Paige Bueckers as it relates to the framework of women's college basketball.
Staley pointed out the narratives surrounding former Iowa Hawkeyes star Caitlin Clark when she spoke about the conversations currently being thrown around about Bueckers.
Clark's individual accomplishments during her rise to stardom over the last couple of years dominated media coverage. Clark was largely, and in some instances solely, credited with women's basketball's steep rise in popularity.
When speaking about Bueckers and the pursuit of her first career championship, Staley suggested there was a tendency "to forget the narrative about what (South Carolina players) have been able to do, going for their third (national championship) in four years."
"Sometimes we create these narratives about great players – Caitlin was one of them; Paige is one of them right now – and we tend to forget the narrative about what our kids have been able to do, going for their third in four years," Staley said during a press conference on Saturday.
"There’s a sentimental narrative about Paige. A great freakin’ player. Anybody would start their franchise with Paige because of her efficient way of playing, because she’s a winner, because she cerebrally just knows the game, just has an aura about her. And she’ll be the number one pick in the WNBA draft. And she’ll be an Olympian. She’ll be all those things. But when you put a narrative out there, everybody sees that, and it puts us at a disadvantage, whether you want to believe so or not. Officials see it. It’s all over TikTok. It’s all over ‘SportsCenter.’ It’s all over all of that."
"And she’s a great player but just because you’re a great player doesn’t mean you need to win the national championship to legitimize it. Paige is legit. She was legit from the moment she stepped on this stage or prior to, in Minnesota. Her career is legendary. She will leave a legacy at UConn whether she wins one or not."
Staley then pointed to South Carolina's experience during last year's run to the national title.
"I just want to put it out there. I can’t not address it because it’s happening. It happened to us last year. Everything was about Caitlin Clark and her legacy and her ability to win a national championship. Yet we were coming into this thing undefeated, doing something that’s unprecedented at the time, because it’s hard. It’s hard. We find ourselves back here in a similar situation."
Staley then expressed her hopes for a more balanced approach.
"I want the sentiments to be about our players and what our players have been able to do – equally, because there's room to do both," she said. "We can raise Paige up because she deserves that and raise our players up because they deserve that. And that’s not talked about enough. There’s room for it in our game. Room for Jose. Room for our game, for all of us to be covered. Let’s not choose a history, one’s history over another program’s history. Let’s not choose one player over another player’s history because we’re all creating history for our game."
On Saturday, ESPN included quotes from Staley's media session in an article covering the Bueckers narrative. The network's women's hoops X, formerly known as Twitter, account, also shared a post with a link to the story.
"Dawn Staley says narrative around Paige Bueckers and her quest to win a title has overshadowed South Carolina’s feats," the post on X read. Staley took issue with how her comments were being presented and responded to the post. "LIES! Fix your headline, please!" the South Carolina wrote on X.
South Carolina went undefeated last season and defeated Clark and the Hawkeyes in the championship game. Iowa also came up short in the 2023 national title game, as LSU dominated the Hawkeyes in that year's title game.
Clark never won a championship during her college career. Nevertheless, she is widely viewed as one of women's college basketball's greatest players – which seems to speak to Staley's point about Bueckers not needing to "win the national championship to legitimize" a player's greatness.
South Carolina and UConn tip off at 3 p.m. ET at Amalie Arena.
The NCAA women's basketball tournament Final Four saw a steep drop-off in TV ratings from last year's record-breaking viewership. Without Clark in the tournament, the broadcasts of UConn vs. UCLA and South Carolina vs. Texas averaged just 3.9 million viewers for ESPN. It marked a 64% decrease from the record-setting 10.8 million viewers in 2024, according to Front Office Sports.
Still, even without Clark, this year's Final Four was the second-most watched in history and was even an improvement from the 2023 edition that also featured Clark.
But Clark's popularity as a college player helped the sport peak at such historic awareness last year that the women's championship game between her Iowa team and Dawn Staley's South Carolina had better ratings than the men's championship game for the first time ever.
With Clark in the WNBA, the pro league benefited from that surge in popularity in 2024.
Clark made the Fever the most-watched team in the WNBA by a landslide in her rookie year, as the 14 most-watched WNBA games of the season all included the Fever. On top of that, she broke the record for most All-Star votes for any player in WNBA history.
In early September, Clark’s Indiana Fever played in front of a TV audience of 1.26 million viewers in a game against the Minnesota Lynx that was played at the same time as a Week-1 Friday night NFL game between the Philadelphia Eagles and Green Bay Packers.
In Clark's first regular-season finale against the Washington Mystics on Sept. 19, the 20,711 fans that showed up at Capital One Arena set a new record for the highest-attended WNBA regular-season contest.
Clark drew a WNBA record 1.84 million viewers to her first playoff game against the Connecticut Sun on Sept. 22, while competing with an NFL Sunday. She followed it up with another record audience of 2.54 million viewers for Game 2.
But after Clark's Fever season ended, the WNBA playoffs also saw a steep drop-off in viewers.
The first game between the Aces and Liberty, a rematch of last year's WNBA finals between two of the league's most popular and successful teams, drew an audience of just 929,000, which was 50% less than the Fever's Game 1 against the Sun.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred says torpedo bats are "absolutely good for baseball," noting that they fall within the rules and demonstrate the sport's "unique place in our culture."
