Exactly 10 seasons ago, at the height of the one-and-done era in college basketball, Duke won the 2015 national title with three freshmen and a sophomore in its starting lineup.
The Blue Devils ranked No. 235 in Division I experience, per KenPom, but they made up for it with youthful ability as freshmen scored 60 of their 68 points in a national championship game victory against Wisconsin. Three of those freshmen were subsequently selected in the first round of the 2015 NBA Draft.
Ten years since winning its last title with that young and talented core, the program is leaning as heavily into freshmen as ever. Like the 2014-15 title-winning team, No. 7 Duke could again start three of them in Monday night’s season opener against Maine.
Can it work? There is no doubting the talent, but there are plenty of concerns about the competition.
Versatile forward Cooper Flagg is projected to be the No. 1 overall pick in the 2025 NBA Draft, and five-star guard Kon Knueppel is poised for a huge freshman season. Both were starters in each of Duke’s exhibition wins. No. 4 overall prospect Khaman Maluach also logged a start in Duke’s second exhibition and could blossom into one of the ACC’s top bigs at just 18 years old.
And that’s to say nothing of fellow highly touted prospects Isaiah Evans, Patrick Ngongba II and Darren Harris, who round out the nation’s top-ranked recruiting class.
The otherworldly collection of talent has made Duke (+950) the betting favorite to win the 2025 national title, according to FanDuel Sportsbook.
So why then is Duke ranked just No. 7 in the preseason AP poll?
Why Duke will be doubted
It’s likely because college basketball has changed significantly since the Blue Devils last cut down the nets, resulting in skepticism that such a young team can rise to the top. In an era when teams are loaded with veteran transfers who have delayed the beginning of their professional careers to extend their NIL earnings potential, it’s fair to wonder if Duke’s freshman investment can still yield a national title return.
The championship formula of recent years has swung back in the direction of age and experience to more closely resemble how Duke constructed its 2010 national championship team.
When the Blue Devils edged Butler in the 2010 national championship game, they did it with a starting lineup consisting of three seniors and two juniors. Duke ranked No. 17 nationally in Division I experience and rode its veteran makeup to college basketball’s zenith. The Blue Devils’ leading scorer that season, senior guard Jon Scheyer, is now entering his third season as the program’s head coach.
The vastly different but similarly effective roster formulas employed by Duke for its 2010 and 2015 titles were consistent with the norms of the time.
Though separated by just five seasons, those titles occurred in different eras.
While one-and-done freshman stars weren’t uncommon in the early 2000s — see the 2003 Syracuse championship team led by Carmelo Anthony and Gerry McNamara — most Final Four teams of that era were veteran-led.
In 2010, the teams joining Duke in the Final Four were Butler, Michigan State and West Virginia. Those four started a combined one freshman during that NCAA Tournament.
It was a similar story in 2009. Even in 2008, when freshman phenoms Derrick Rose (Memphis) and Kevin Love (UCLA) were main characters in the Final Four, they were the lone diaper dandy starters on their teams, and Rose wasn’t even Memphis’ leading scorer.
Ohio State reached the Final Four with multiple freshman starters in 2007 when Mike Conley Jr. and Greg Oden led the Buckeyes to the Promised Land. But they lost in the championship game to a Florida team ranking No. 16 in D-I experience.
Outside of the 2003 Syracuse team with McNamara and Anthony, no 21st century national-title winning team had multiple freshmen starters until UConn in 2011 with Jeremy Lamb, Shabazz Napier and Roscoe Smith.
Even then, it was a veteran, Kemba Walker, who put those Huskies on his back and carried them to glory. But that 2011 UConn title marked the beginning of a one-and-done zenith that culminated with Duke’s 2015 championship fueled by the freshman trio Jahlil Okafor, Tyus Jones and Justise Winslow.
The height of the one-and-done era
2011: UConn wins the national title with three freshmen in its starting lineup.
2012: Kentucky wins the national title with three freshmen in its starting lineup.
2013: Michigan plays in the national championship game with three freshman starters.
2014: Kentucky plays in the national title game with a starting lineup consisting exclusively of freshmen.
2015: Duke wins it all with three freshmen in its starting lineup.
Multiple teams in the sport were finding high-level postseason success with freshmen-oriented lineups. However, the success of that formula did not last.
The downturn in success
Since the 2015 Blue Devils won the championship, just one of 32 Final Four teams has started multiple freshmen. It was the 2022 Duke squad that lost to North Carolina in the Final Four to cap coach Mike Krzyzewski’s legendary career.
With Kentucky’s freshmen-oriented era flaming out in a series of disappointing March Madness performances, Duke resides on an island by itself now in attempting to operate a title-caliber program built on freshmen. UK’s postseason success became so sparse that John Calipari left for Arkansas after last season.
Calipari is still clinging to vestiges of the old way as his Razorbacks started a pair of freshmen — Boogie Fland and Karter Knox — in their exhibition victory over Kansas last month. But his last four teams at Kentucky were each led in scoring by transfers, not freshmen.
There are no mere vestiges at Duke. There is a wholesale commitment to the idea that a talented freshmen class can be the impetus for reaching the summit.
To be clear, this Duke team looks every bit as talented as its 2015 title-winning counterpart and appears close to the level of even the best freshman-laden Kentucky teams that made deep NCAA Tournament teams under Calipari.
The top freshmen are just as talented now as they were then, perhaps even moreso in Flagg’s case.
What’s different now is the higher ceiling offered to programs taking an alternative route.
No longer are programs that don’t go the one-and-done direction pigeonholed into developing whatever is left from the AAU circuit after Kentucky, Duke and a handful of others are done taking their pick from the five-star talent.
Now, they can recruit proven college talent from other colleges, pay them handsomely and play them immediately. Did you miss on a couple of four-star players two recruiting cycles back? No problem. Go and dangle six-figure NIL agreements in front of formerly unheralded prospects that other programs developed into all-conference performers but can’t afford to keep.
UConn found a game-changing piece of its back-to-back national titles at East Carolina in the form of point guard Tristen Newton. It landed another stud transfer from Rutgers last June in Cam Spencer, who began his career at Loyola (Maryland). His outside shooting and toughness were instrumental in leading the Huskies to a repeat.
Therein lies a hidden and under-discussed key to Duke’s ultimate aspirations. Sixth-year forward Mason Gillis transferred in from Purdue after helping the Boilermakers reach the Final Four. Fifth-year guard Sion James is on hand after averaging 14 points at Tulane last season, and junior forward Maliq Brown has arrived after shining as one of the ACC’s top defenders at Syracuse.
With sophomore guard Caleb Foster and junior guard Tyrese Proctor also back from last year’s Elite Eight run, there may be just enough veteran moxie to counterbalance the program’s doubledown on a freshman-based formula that no longer works for anyone else in the sport.
Make no mistake, though — Duke’s ceiling will be determined by the freshmen.
If it pans out with another Final Four run, Duke will be the toast of college basketball and Scheyer will be cemented as one of the new faces of changing vanguard in the sport’s coaching ranks.
If it doesn’t, Duke may need to consider whether life on Freshman Island — where your closest neighbor is now Rutgers — is truly the surest path to snapping the program’s longest national title drought since Krzyzewski won his first in 1991.
Read the full article here
