Duke needs to limit the ‘mess-ups’ if the Blue Devils want to keep advancing in women’s NCAA tournament

It took one game for the first thrown coaching item of the women’s NCAA tournament. It was Duke’s Kara Lawson with the whiteboard at Cameron Indoor Stadium, deep into a first-round matchup that the No. 3 seed was winning by 22 points. 

On the one hand, this is Kara Lawson we’re talking about. 

“Yeah, I wake up intense,” Lawson said with such conviction in the post-game press conference, the four words came out as one. “I’m always at the next level. That’s how I am. There’s an urgency about me.” 

On the other hand, Duke didn’t come out with a confidence-instilling performance worthy of a Final Four contender slotted into Sacramento 2, arguably the most loaded regional with No. 1 UCLA and No. 2 LSU. Lawson tossed the whiteboard behind the bench after a timeout huddle amid a losing fourth quarter. That the Blue Devils would advance wasn’t in doubt. They went on to an 81-64 win over No. 14 College of Charleston to reach the second round for a fourth consecutive season. 

That they can keep moving through the bracket with those lapses is less sure. The Cougars shot 53.3% from the field in the fourth quarter — nearly three times the 18.5% they posted in the first three quarters. Their four 3-pointers on six attempts blew out the 2-of-16 coming into the frame. And they clawed back from 28 points down.

Junior Taryn Barbot fueled the success with 17 of her game-high 36 points. It was the most Duke gave up to a single player since former N.C. State guard and current Dallas Wing Aziaha James hit 36 in February 2025. 

“We definitely held our own,” Cougars head coach Robin Harmony said of the program’s first NCAA tournament appearance. “When you play a team like Duke, who is very good, and don’t be surprised if you don’t see them in the Final Four, we could have gotten beat by 60. We kind of hung in there just long enough. Again, hit shots, and we’d have been still back in that ball game a little bit more.”

It all seems small. Duke still won by 17 points and smashed their name onto the next line. They’ll play No. 6 Baylor, which outlasted First Four winner Nebraska in the second game from Chapel Hill on Friday. But, these early games are an opportunity to stake one’s claim on the women’s side, where blowouts grossly outnumber Cinderellas. 

And Lawson understands that how one starts the tournament matters in how they end it. 

“It’s March; you want to win, you want to play well, you want to build momentum,” Lawson said. “So no matter who’s on the court, no matter what the score is, there’s a standard by which we play. And if we don’t play that, then, it’s my job to get them to that level. That’s not new to them, our players. That’s how I am. That was a normal day.” 

Duke’s defense relied too heavily on fouls, where Charleston scored nearly one-third of their points (22-of-25). Starting guards Riley Nelson and Taina Mair were in foul trouble by the fourth quarter for a team that doesn’t tap into bench production often. 

The Blue Devils gave up another 22 points off 20 turnovers. It hit Charleston’s per-game average, and eight points higher than Duke’s average allowed, per CBB Analytics. 

They let the Cougars dictate aspects of the game that will cost them against LSU’s nearly record-shattering offensive production and UCLA’s well-oiled two-way dominance. Junior Jordan Wood and sophomore All-American third-team forward Toby Fournier took responsibility for doing a better job of controlling the pace of the game and making the right decisions. 

This is a squad with a realistic shot to reach the Elite Eight again despite a 3-6 start to the season. They learned, tweaked and fixed a lot while losing to the season’s clear top-tier teams, as well as a few middling ones. Lawson was asked if they could fix the issues that crept up against Charleston now, with 48 hours before another win-or-go-home matchup. Baylor was one of those six losses, taking the season opener, 58-52, in Paris when Bears transfer Taliah Scott scored 12 of her 24 points in the fourth quarter. Duke lost the second half, 29-19. 

“It’s not like a broken light bulb where you can just go to Home Depot and get it and twist it in,” Lawson said. “That’s not how it works. When you say, ‘can you fix’ … it’s not a snap-your-fingers nature. It’s a gradual growth toward having a higher percentage of adherence to the scheme. We’re going to have mess-ups, right? We want to lower the amount of them.”