Still Buzzing After Duke’s Win Over Texas Tech In The 2022 Sweet Sixteen?

Well hopefully some of you got some sleep after the Duke Texas Tech game because that’s the sort of game that can keep you up. Where do you rank that one?

It’s up there, largely because the Red Raiders are so good defensively. And when we say up there, we mean tournament games basically but you could put it up against a lot of regular season classics.

It’s not the same as a buzzer beater. We wouldn’t compare it to Duke-Kentucky or the Austin Rivers game or the Tre Jones/Wendell Moore miracle. You could make a reasonable comparison to the Duke-UNLV game in 1991 although neither team is as talented as those two were and certainly Duke is not as experienced this time.

But it was, indisputably, a brilliant performance by both teams. Texas Tech is a masterful defensive team.

So for Duke to do what it did in the second half is borderline ridiculous.

Duke shot 70.8 percent and scored 49 points in the second - and didn’t miss a shot in something like the last 7:30.

And this is, remember, a very young team. And Texas Tech is anything but.

So it’s doubly amazing that Duke managed to pull off an extraordinary win. And think about this: we saw a 75-year-old coach and a team with mostly freshmen and sophomores all at the tops of their game.

Of course that’s yesterday’s news, quite literally. Arkansas took out Gonzaga and that’s a really huge accomplishment. And somewhat like Texas Tech, Arkansas is athletic and supremely tough mentally.

Nothing gets easier from here. In fact, quite the opposite. But this team has developed in startling ways, and at warp speed. It’s impossible not to be excited by what it’s accomplished.