Jon Scheyer, Duke are using past loses as fuel in 2026-27 - ESPN

DURHAM, NORTH CAROLINA -- Duke head coach Jon Scheyer woke up one midsummer morning and steeled himself.

«Today's the day,» he told himself.

He knew it had to happen at some point in the offseason, and decided it was finally time: He was going to rewatch Duke's Elite Eight loss to UConn for the first time.

It wasn't a task circled on his to-do list, necessarily, but Scheyer knew rewatching that game had to be part of his usual offseason process.

«Losing sucks. And losing in a way you never think you're going to lose sucks,» he told ESPN in September. «But how you got there, you can't forget. You can't diminish that stuff, either. I was very cautious. If I didn't watch that game, I would've skipped steps.»

Scheyer entered his fifth season at Duke with the backdrop of two heartbreaking defeats to end each of the past two seasons: the Elite Eight loss to UConn on a 35-footer from Braylon Mullins — a game the Blue Devils had led by 19 — and a Final Four loss to Houston the year before in which they gave up a nine-point lead in the final two minutes.

There was a noticeable difference in the ways Scheyer handled each of those season-ending losses. He rewatched the Houston game «a million times» last offseason, he said, though he called it the harder loss to understand. That 2025 Cooper Flagg-led Duke team was playing its best basketball late in the season, rolling through the campaign with some of the best advanced metrics the sport has ever seen.

But the loss to UConn — on a buzzer-beating 35-footer after a turnover — produced a different feeling.

«All of a sudden, you go from one moment the plan is what we thought — we're going to another Final Four, and I like our chances — and then the next moment, your season's done,»