【willbetget the cheese】2025 NCAA Tournament Final Four: How the National Semifinals Will Play Out

Saturday’s second semifinal offers some remarkable contrasts. Houston coach Kelvin Sampson is one of the game’s elder statesmen, a longtime fixture in college basketball who reached his first Final Four in 2002 — a year before Duke coach Jon Scheyer debuted as a high school standout for Glenbrook North High School.

The theme of old school vs. new also manifests in Sampson’s Houston team playing a methodical style predicated on suffocating defense to set the tone, while Scheyer’s Blue Devils get up and down the court to the tune of 83.7 points per game.

Now, depicting the comparative talent levels between the teams as another contrast would be flat-out wrong — even if some have made that comparison in the lead-up to the Final Four. Houston has a variety of former top-100 recruits, including star veteran LJ Cryer.

None of the Cougars came to college with the level of prep stardom that Cooper Flagg had before arriving at Duke, however. Flagg is arguably the most high-profile freshman since Duke predecessor Zion Williamson and is two wins away from potentially matching Anthony Davis as a first-year national champion and national player of the year.

Along with the hype coming in — which Flagg has met, if not exceeded, in an 18.9-point, 7.5-rebound, 4.2-assist campaign — Flagg also gives Duke its most difficult quality to overcome: its size.

The 6-foot-9 Flagg can go inside but functions at times like a combo guard. That on its own creates headaches for opponents defensively and is unlike anything Houston’s nation-leading 58.3-points-per-game defense has faced.

But as the nation’s longest team in all of college basketball this year, per KenPom.com, Duke creates as many defensive mismatches as offensive. With 6-foot-7 fellow freshman phenom Kon Knueppel on the wing and 7-foot-2 Khaman Maluach down low, Duke has held opponents to 62.6 points per game.

Houston’s uniquely adept defense forces even the most prolific offenses into a rock fight behind Joseph Tugler, Mylik Wilson and Emanuel Sharp. But can the Cougars find the offense to outscore Duke, even in a low-scoring game?

Cryer might need to summon an individual performance akin to Caleb Love’s for Arizona against Duke in the Sweet 16.

Winner: Duke gets just enough offense to escape Houston’s defensive clamps.