NCAA Basketball: Duke's outlook, Florida's surge highlight March 8 Rauf Report

The Rauf Report breaks down the biggest takeaways from the week of NCAA basketball, including in-depth looks at Duke, Florida and more.

Welcome to the final Rauf Report of the NCAA basketball season! It’s hard to believe we’re already at this point of the year. Conference tournaments are already going hot and heavy, giving us the kind of drama that makes this time of year so special (shoutout to the Atlantic Sun).

There will be four automatic bids handed out this weekend, while the regular season wraps up for those leagues starting their tournaments next week. Plenty of big games will keep you glued to your television — but none will be bigger than Duke-North Carolina.

UNC has already claimed a share of the ACC regular-season title. If Duke knocks off the Tar Heels in Cameron Indoor Stadium on Saturday, the Blue Devils will claim their own share. This Duke team has been stacking up victories since a 5-3 start and could be a No. 2 seed in the NCAA Tournament. So why isn’t there much Final Four hype around this team?

We start this Rauf Report with why I’m not buying the Blue Devils as a legitimate threat in the Big Dance.

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How legitimate is Duke’s lofty record?

Duke has won 19 of its last 22 games since Dec. 2, and you have to tip your hat to the Blue Devils for being that steady. Just look at how other teams around the country have struggled to find consistency.

However, after digging deeper into this 19-3 stretch, there are issues worth noting.

For starters, most of this span consisted of conference games — and this has certainly been a down year for the ACC. Only the Blue Devils, Tar Heels and Clemson are surefire NCAA Tournament teams. Virginia, Wake Forest and Pitt are still in the bubble conversation, but the point remains: The ACC is down.

Between those five teams above and three more nonconference opponents, Jon Scheyer’s squad has played 10 games against potential NCAA Tournament teams. In those top-flight contests, Duke isn’t anywhere near as dominant. Opponents are shooting better than the Blue Devils from the perimeter. Meanwhile, the significant rebounding edge Duke has against weaker teams drops to nearly nothing in tougher games. Moreover, Duke is losing the turnover battle to its high-level opponents.

Duke has gone 4-2 in six games against teams currently in the bubble conversation, per Heat Check CBB bracketologist Lukas Harkins. Meanwhile, the Blue Devils split their four matchups with locked-in NCAA Tournament squads. They were firmly outplayed in losses to Arizona and North Carolina. The wins weren’t convincing, either. Duke needed free throws in the final seconds to beat Clemson at home and used a late surge to beat Baylor at Madison Square Garden.

Saturday’s game against the Tar Heels is a chance for the Blue Devils to make a statement. Will they look like a team capable of making a long tournament run? They have struggled with NCAA Tournament-level competition this year — and soon, that’s all they’ll have in front of them.

To this point, Duke simply hasn’t shown the firepower to be a legitimate Final Four threat.

Florida will be a team to watch in the postseason

Florida, on the other hand, has firepower in droves. The Gators have been a solid team all year, but they were featured in an earlier Rauf Report because they simply could not finish games. Since then, Todd Golden’s squad has been on an absolute tear.

This team has won 10 of its last 13 games, routinely beating the kind of quality teams they struggled with during the first half of the season. Wins over Kentucky, Auburn and Alabama highlight this turnaround, but the three defeats — a one-point loss at Texas A&M, an overtime loss at Alabama, a six-point loss at South Carolina — are informative. The Gators have been consistently competitive through the entirety of this 13-game stretch.

“I feel confident that we can compete with anybody on a neutral floor over the next couple of weeks,” Golden told reporters after Florida’s 105-87 win over Alabama on Tuesday. “Hopefully we can stay the course and our guys will handle success the right way and make sure we get back to work.”

The Gators have the makeup of a team that can be successful in the NCAA Tournament. Guard play is always crucial in March, and the backcourt duo of Walter Clayton Jr. and Zyon Pullin can compete with anyone. Florida also has depth and size, particularly in Tyrese Samuel, who has emerged as a force over the past three weeks.

Florida is trending around a No. 6 or 7 seed in the tournament, per BracketMatrix. But don’t sleep on the Gators. This team is peaking at the right time, and no one will want to face them in the Big Dance.

Zakai Zeigler’s emergence as a high-level offensive weapon

Staying in the SEC, a strong finish has Tennessee angling for the final No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament. The Vols won the league’s regular-season title outright and have won seven consecutive games coming into Saturday’s showdown against Kentucky.

Dalton Knecht is the star carrying most of the offensive load for this group. Knecht has turned in an All-American performance this season and should be a unanimous first-teamer. However, Tennessee’s rise from good to great coincides with a more efficient Zakai Zeigler.

The junior point guard has been one of the nation’s best defenders throughout his career. He has also flashed offensive brilliance at times, but it has been inconsistent at best. Since Tennessee’s loss to South Carolina, though, Zeigler has been playing like the best two-way point guard in the country.

“The one thing we don’t want to do is totally rely on Dalton, and I thought maybe the biggest play of the game was Zakai’s 3,” Barnes told reporters after Zeigler’s late triple helped the Vols put away South Carolina and clinch the SEC title. “I thought that was a huge play at the time … but I told the coaches, we’re relying on [Knecht] a little bit too much.”

Knecht’s presence and scoring ability help to distinguish this squad from the rest of the Rick Barnes era. Before Knecht’s arrival, the Vols had consistently lacked an elite shot-maker who could get a bucket when needed. However, the pendulum swung the other way early this year, and Tennessee was in danger of becoming a one-man show.

Zeigler’s emergence has made them even more dangerous — and a real threat to win the national title.

UNLV’s opportunity

In that same Jan. 19 Rauf Report where I detailed the Vols’ issues, I also wrote about UNLV’s turnaround after a disastrous 3-4 start. The Rebels then lost their next two games — including a puzzling 32-point home loss to Air Force — and consequently fell off the national radar.

However, UNLV has rediscovered its stride over its last 11 games. The Runnin’ Rebels are 10-1 over this stretch, including victories over New Mexico, Colorado State and San Diego State. None was more impressive than beating the Aztecs on Tuesday, which became UNLV’s fifth Quad 1 victory of the season.

Thanks to this run of form, UNLV is back on the outskirts of the bubble conversation. That said, those five Q1 wins are largely being canceled out by three Q4 losses. As such, it’s a conversation that will play out in real time over the coming days.

In particular, Saturday’s game against in-state rival Nevada has a chance to make things really interesting.

First, the game has some immediate ramifications. As good as the Mountain West has been this season with six projected NCAA Tournament teams not named UNLV, the Rebels are at the forefront of the conference title race. If Utah State loses to New Mexico on Saturday, the Rebels will earn a share of the MW crown with a win over the Wolf Pack.

UNLV winning the league seemed unthinkable after that loss to Air Force, but the Rebels have been playing like a conference champion of late. They rank No. 8 nationally in adjusted defensive efficiency since the Air Force game, per Torvik. In the process, more opponents have scored under 50 points (two) than have dumped in more than 70 (one). Freshman point guard Dedan Thomas Jr. has also blossomed, becoming the driving force behind this run.

The Rebels have been playing like an NCAA Tournament team, and beating Nevada could put them over the at-large hump. No team with six Quad 1 victories has ever missed the NCAA Tournament, nor has any team with four Quad 1A wins. UNLV can hit both of those numbers with a win over the Wolf Pack.

Needless to say, there is a lot on the line in Reno this weekend.

The James Madison Conundrum

FOX Sports’ John Fanta had an excellent column this week about James Madison. The piece focused on how the Dukes were only able to schedule their season-opening victory over Michigan State after assistant coach Matt Bucklin called in a favor to his uncle, Tom Izzo.

JMU knew it had the makings of a good team from the get-go. The team wanted to schedule some high-profile nonconference matchups to build its potential NCAA Tournament resume, but those schools knew how good the Dukes were projected to be.

“Pretty much everybody in the country told us no when we were trying to schedule,” JMU head coach Mark Byington told Fanta. “We would love to get on a bus and play somebody in Virginia, Maryland or North Carolina in a guarantee game. We got told no by all of them. So, we had to use a relationship. We needed to find somebody.”

This is not uncommon in college basketball. Teams in the top leagues will shy away from these kinds of games because they know the risks they’re taking. Just look at what happened to Michigan State: The Dukes upset the Spartans, and it instantly changed the perception of a preseason top-five team.

I’m calling this “The James Madison Conundrum,” but getting stonewalled in the scheduling process is a widespread problem most good mid-major programs face. The Dukes are 28-3 entering the Sun Belt Tournament, and two of those losses came against a very good Appalachian State team. And yet, JMU isn’t a consensus bubble team because of its relatively weak strength of schedule.

The Dukes played 21 Quad 4 games this season, including nine in nonconference action because they couldn’t get anyone else to play them. Meanwhile, some of the better mid-major opponents on JMU’s early schedule ended up having down seasons.

No 28-win team has ever missed the NCAA Tournament. However, thanks to an incredibly difficult scheduling landscape for high-level mid-majors, James Madison may become the first.

NCAA Basketball: Duke’s outlook, Florida’s surge highlight March 8 Rauf Report

The Rauf Report breaks down the biggest takeaways from the week of NCAA basketball, including in-depth looks at Duke, Florida and more.