WINSTON-SALEM - Chris Carrawell had an idea why Duke was just one of three higher-seeded teams to survive Upset Sunday, the NCAA Tournament's most upside-down day in recent memory.
"You have all these teams going out there with tight asses," Carrawell said after a scrappy defensive performance keyed No. 1 Duke's 69-64 win over eighth-seeded Kansas. "They're playing tight."
The battle-tested Blue Devils looked anything but afraid as they improved to 9-3 in games decided by less than 10 points. But that was not the case for South region top seed Stanford, which fell 60-53 to No. 8 North Carolina, or for No. 2 seeds Cincinnati and Temple, upset by Tulsa and Seton Hall, respectively.
Ohio State, a 1999 Final Four participant, also fell by the wayside, as did defending champ Connecticut, though the fifth-seeded Huskies' loss to No. 4 Tennessee was technically not an upset.
When the second-round dust had settled, Duke and Michigan State were the only No. 1 seeds still standing. In fact, the Sweet 16 contained just four of the top 12 seeded teams."You have to go out firing all your bullets," Carrawell
The Blue Devils escaped the upset bug, but by the time they took the floor in the final game of the second round, they were well aware of its victims.
"We are all college basketball fans, and we've been watching," Shane Battier said. "We've seen it. If that's not motivation, I don't know what is."
"And it didn't help that they kept announcing the scores [on the public address system]."
Carrawell traced the uneasiness at the top to a somewhat unlikely source: Cincinnati's Kenyon Martin.
Martin, the consensus national player of the year, broke his right fibula in the Conference USA tournament, dashing the title hopes of then-No. 1 Cincinnati.
Rather than inspiring the rest of the pack, Carrawell said, Cincinnati's free fall actually made things tougher on the nation's other top teams.
The fact that this tournament is wide open, perhaps more so than any in the past decade, has made more than a few contenders go wide-eyed at the possibilities, and caused them to buckle under pressure, too.
Things are craziest in the West region, where No. 4 LSU is the highest-seeded team advancing to the regional semifinals at Albuquerque, N.M. Tenth-seeded Gonzaga, an Elite Eight team in 1999, faces No. 6 Purdue, which upset Oklahoma Saturday.
Duke struggled early against Kansas, an unusually-strong No. 8 seed, falling behind 13-4. For a while it looked like the Blue Devils might go the way of Stanford and Arizona, which lost to Wisconsin Saturday night in Salt Lake City, Utah.
"With all those high seeds falling, it seemed like déjà vu," Carrawell said. "Like, 'Oh no, it's going to happen to us, too.'"
But the Blue Devils survived, and while some of the day's upsets were hot talk in the Duke locker room, no one seemed to raise an eyebrow over at least one result.
"I told my staff yesterday that I thought North Carolina would win," Duke coach Mike Krzyzewski said, while adding a jab at the tournament selection committee. "They are good and they come out of the ACC, which is a good conference, worthy of more than three bids."
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