No. 1 Duke buries Baylor as Cooper Flagg, Blue Devils roll on to Sweet 16

RALEIGH, N.C. — Three minutes of suffocation were enough to send Duke to the Sweet 16.

Because, frankly, the final three minutes of Sunday’s first half — when No. 1 Duke went on a 12-0 run, and No. 9 Baylor couldn’t muster a single point — were the difference in the Blue Devils’ eventual 89-66 win. A 17-point halftime margin got only as close as 13 over the final 20 minutes.

Too steep a margin, against too talented a team, to make more of a dent than that.

Now, had Baylor been able to maintain the same effectiveness it had in the game’s first 10 minutes, we might be talking about a different situation. Behind graduate big man Norchad Omier’s offensive rebounding, Scott Drew’s squad hung neck-and-neck with the Blue Devils out of the gate, with Omier leading a balanced interior scoring effort. Omier finished with 15 points and nine rebounds, and Duke freshman Cooper Flagg said he was “strong as hell” at one point mid-game. But Omier picked up his second personal foul, and given the Bears’ lack of other frontcourt options, Drew had no choice but to sit him.

It quickly became clear how much Omier’s physicality was propping up Baylor’s overall effort, because the Bears came unglued in a matter of minutes. Duke promptly rattled off a 10-0 run — punctuated by Patrick Ngongba drawing a Flagrant 1 foul on Baylor reserve Marino Dubravcic — that gave Jon Scheyer’s squad a little breathing room. And then, minutes later, came the decisive sequence: Flagg (who finished with 18 points, nine rebounds and six assists in his second NCAA Tournament game) scoring seven of 12 points, before Caleb Foster’s runner with 6.1 ticks left removed any remaining doubt about the outcome at Lenovo Center.

The second half was simply a 20-minute coronation thereafter, with the Bears never able to seriously chip away at Duke’s lead.

Anytime Baylor got close, it felt like Duke junior guard Tyrese Proctor drained a pivotal triple that kept the Bears at bay. He finished the game with a career-best 25 points, courtesy of his career-high seven 3-pointers. Proctor has hit six 3s in each of Duke’s past three games, going an absurd 19-for-30 (63.3 percent) from deep over that stretch. For someone who made one 3 in the second weekend of the NCAA Tournament last season — including a disastrous 0-for-5 effort against NC State in the Elite Eight — his recent uptick couldn’t have come at a better time.

Much of the focus entering Sunday’s game was about Baylor graduate guard Jeremy Roach, who spent the first four seasons of his college career with the Blue Devils and who led Duke to the Final Four in Mike Krzyzewski’s final season. But Roach, who scored seven points in 26 minutes off the bench, could make little difference as his storied college career came to an end.

Outside of Omier, the Bears were led by star freshman VJ Edgecombe, a protected top-five pick in this summer’s NBA Draft. Edgecombe picked Baylor over Duke coming out of high school, and while he flashed moments of excellence en route to a team-high 16 points and six rebounds, the Blue Devils ultimately finished with the upper hand.

And with confirmation they’ll be flying to Newark later this week, the next step in their pursuit of the program’s sixth national championship. Duke will play the winner of Sunday night’s game between No. 4 Arizona and No. 5 Oregon.

(Photo of Tyrese Proctor, No. 5, Sion James, No. 14 and Cooper Flagg, No. 2:  Jared C. Tilton / Getty Images)