X-Factor: Resurgent Roach looks to keep the fire burning in Duke men's basketball's Elite 8 matchup with Arkansas

Another high-stakes matchup awaits No. 2-seed Duke in No. 4-seed Arkansas in the Elite Eight for a berth in the all-coveted Final Four in New Orleans next weekend. Here’s a player for each team that can be the difference in getting there:

Duke: Jeremy Roach

This feels obvious.

With the Blue Devils trailing late in the second frame to a Texas Tech squad who had out-muscled, out-worked and heretofore out-performed them, Duke needed a hero, and fast. Staring a Sweet 16 strikeout square in the face, Roach stepped up to the plate and delivered. While he didn’t put up the ridiculous scoring numbers of freshman teammate Paolo Banchero or the immense effort on the glass of Mark Williams, the sophomore point guard ran the floor for the last few minutes and, not superfluously, turned the game from a hard-fought disappointment into a resilient triumph.

With 3:35 to go, Roach powered to the rim and finished a difficult layup to give his side the lead—a lead it wouldn’t surrender for the rest of the game—and followed it up with a couple of pull-up jumpers inside 2:16. Banchero did Banchero things (and even some extra with his 3-of-4 clip from deep) to steal the statistical show, but Roach’s drives into traffic with his team’s future on the line were what brought these Blue Devils to their 17th Elite Eight under Krzyzewski. Fifteen points, four rebounds and five assists are impressive numbers in and of themselves, but the fact that they primarily came in the final minutes to snatch a win from the jaws of defeat makes them monumental.

In the post-game presser, Banchero was quick to dismiss that Duke players have a “clutch gene” that enables them to close out tough contests and go a perfect 8-for-8 on their final set of shots. Against the assertion of his teammate, however, it seems a pretty safe bet to say Roach has that clutch gene. A performance like that at a time like that doesn’t come out of nowhere, and if he stays on fire against the Razorbacks, Krzyzewski’s final chapter may just have a few more pages to turn.

Arkansas: JD Notae

There were a lot of reasons Arkansas was able to forcibly wake Gonzaga from its dream of a first national title, but one of the biggest was an absolutely monstrous showing from senior JD Notae. The Razorback star dropped 21 points, pulled down six boards and had six dishes in that historic day to give Arkansas its first-ever win against a No. 1-seed in March and become the premier team to knock off the top seed in both the regular and postseason.

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