Duke survived Siena, but getting pushed by a No. 16-seed is no way to start a title run originally appeared on The Sporting News.
Add The Sporting News as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
GREENVILLE, S.C. – The clock on my iPhone read 4:47 p.m., and the clock measuring the time left in the game showed 4:26. That’s how long it took for Duke to take command of its first-round NCAA Tournament meeting with Siena. That was the moment Isaiah Evans snaked past the defense for a lefty scoop lay-in that put the Blue Devils ahead.
So there would be history made here, just not that history.
There would not be a third No. 16 seed eliminating a No. 1.
This No. 1, though, was tortured in ways no team in their position ever had been.
Duke trailed for 28:31 of the 40 minutes. The Devils faced a double-digit halftime deficit, the first time that’s ever happened for a No. 1 seed. That they ultimately won, 71-65, hardly is beside the point for continued pursuit of a championship. Not a single No. 1 seed that advanced to become a champion won its first-round game by a single-digit margin. The closest any future champion came to being upset by a 16 seed was 15 points. The average margin for those champs: 39.
MARCH MADNESS HQ:Live NCAA bracket | TV schedule | Latest news and more
“You have to give a lot of credit to Siena. They outplayed us today,” freshman point guard Caden Boozer said in the Duke locker room. “I think the biggest thing was we didn’t want to go home. We all made sure of that. We did what we needed to do to survive it.
“I think we have a lot of learning points going forward.”
One could say the Duke players took Siena lightly, and both Caden and brother Cameron Boozer presented some version of this. From courtside, though, it appeared more coach Gerry McNamara’s Saints took the Devils heavily. It was more their intensity than the Devils’ alleged malaise. When Duke coach Jon Scheyer called a timeout with 11:29 left in the first half, it was obvious his team was in for a game it hadn’t anticipated.
“We just didn’t come out with a defensive mindset. That’s what we’ve hung our hats on all year long,” Cameron Boozer said. “We’ve got to continue to do that. Tonight we didn’t do that in the first half, but you saw what we did in the second half. When we come out there with that mindset, we can guard anyone in the country.”
Surely those Devils could; overall, they are the No. 1 defensive efficiency team in the country. What about these Devils, though? Duke was playing without injured two injured starters: point guard Caleb Foster and big man Patrick Ngongba. The Devils won the ACC Tournament in that state, but this is different, and everyone in the arena was aware.
“We thought we could win that game,” said Siena guard Gavin Doty, who led his team with 21 points. “I think a lot of people are going to have respect for us now.”
HISTORY OF UPSETS BY SEED:
16 vs. 1 | 15 vs. 2 | 14 vs. 3 | 13 vs. 4 | 12 vs. 5
Too often now in sports, this is how it operates: One arrives at a conclusion, then reaches for handy facts to support it. Rational thought is rare. In the 2025 NCAA Tournament, there were only three upsets among teams seeded at least four positions lower than their opponents in the 2025 bracket: No. 12 Colorado State over No. 5 Memphis, No. 11 Drake over No. 6 Missouri and No. 12 McNeese over No. 5 Clemson.
Immediately, an avalanche of analysts — some who cover the game regularly, many who pay attention only when March arrives – declared that NIL payments and the immediate eligibility component of the transfer portal had turned March Madness into a pile of “chalk”.
There were prominent voices in college basketball, for instance ESPN’s Jay Bilas, who cautioned that one year’s worth of data was not nearly enough to declare the death of the March Madness “Cinderella”.
Hey, everyone forgot Cinderella is so resilient, her story still is creeping into modern TV programs such as “Bridgerton”.
And then, before this tournament even was four hours old, we had No. 1 overall seed Duke trailing Metro Atlantic third-place finisher Siena by double digits at half.
We had Big South champion High Point hit 15 3-pointers to squeeze past No. 5 seed Wisconsin.
And there still were 28½ first-round games to play.
“The biggest thing we did was, we weren’t playing scared,” center Riley Mulvey said. “Most 16 seeds, you play scared, and you’re out of the game before it even starts.”
Siena’s lead over the Blue Devils was remarkable in that it was the first instance of a No. 16 seed holding a double-digit lead over a No. 1 seed in the first half. It was too early in the game to suggest a Siena defeat from that point would constitute “blowing” the lead, but not so much as to say a Duke victory would not require a comeback.
When UMBC took down Virginia in 2018, the first-ever victory by a 16 seed in a format that was launched in 1985, the Retrievers were tied at halftime with UVa. In the only one since, FDU’s lead at the break was a single point.
“I’ve known Gerry for a long time. GMac had his guys way more ready to play than I did,” Scheyer said. “That’s one of the hardest moments for me in sport, period, to not have your best stuff.”
Siena’s 11-point lead might have been tough to overcome but for the Saints’ humanity beginning to reveal itself early in the second half. On a single possession, with their advantage at 13 points, they missed two dunks, first by Mulvey, and then from Frances Folefac.
Mulvey forced a turnaround jumper over Cameron Boozer that would have been improbable in a MAAC game. With 16:10 left, Justice Shoats’ 30-foot three pointer caught every bit of the rim but not nearly enough of the net. They’d gotten Scheyer to shift into a zone defense to confuse them, to force a different sort of calculation and perhaps to hide some issues that had developed in Duke’s man D, and they weren’t effective against that scheme.
Siena scored one 3-pointer from the 18:24 mark until 14 minutes remained, and the lead shrunk all the way to a single basket.
Siena managed to get that back to 5 points at 61-56 on Doty’s left corner 3-pointer from behind a perfectly set screen, but after Caden Boozer missed a layup for the Devils with 7:34 left, Shoats surrendered the ball to Caden on a meek, needless turnover near the midcourt line, and that was transformed into a bucket quicker than one can say fastbreak layup. What could have become a three-possession lead and turned the heat on the Devils beyond Hades levels had been transformed into the game’s biggest play for Duke.
SN AWARDS: All-America team | Player of the Year | Coach of the Year
“Look, I wish it could just be smooth sailing,” Scheyer said. “These guys, even though we have returners from last year's team, we're all in different spots. You can face a team like Siena. They're incredibly ready to play. We made some mistakes early that they made us pay for. All of a sudden, you want to win very badly, so you can start making plays to try to get back in the game that are probably uncharacteristic of who we've been.”
This occasion also was uncharacteristic of a champion, though. It's also uncommon for a team to navigate the whole of this tournament with less than a full boat and still reach the desired destination. Scheyer has said Ngongba should return soon, but also that Foster might not be available unless the team plays deep into the tournament.
Now Duke is not just playing against the field. The Devils are playing against history.
Sure, history is not undefeated. It’s closer than the Blue Devils, though, even as their record (eventually) improved to 33-2.
MORE MARCH MADNESS NEWS: