Clemson Embarrasses Duke, Wins by 27

Duke Coach K called a timeout in the final minute, gathered his beaten Blue Devils around him and let them listen as the Littlejohn Coliseum crowd celebrated a Clemson win like few others.

"They shouldn't forget this loss," Krzyzewski said. "This is as bad as you can play."

Trevor Booker scored 21 and Terrence Oglesby had five 3's in the 10th-ranked Tigers' 74-47 victory over #4 Duke.

Krzyzewski, typically a bright-side coach, found nothing satisfying about this defeat. The Blue Devils (19-3, 6-2 ACC) hadn't had a loss like this since the 1990 NCAA title game when UNLV beat the Blue Devils 103-73.

Kryzyzewski and his team stored that away and responded by winning the next two NCAA championships.

"What you take from anything," he said, "is the responsibility of what you've done."

"There are no excuses," he said.

For Clemson (19-2, 5-2), it was further proof this is a far different club.

It's different from the one two years ago that opened 17-0 yet failed to make the NCAAs tournament. It's different from the one three weeks ago that fell apart in an earlier top 10 showdown, falling 78-68 to Wake Forest.

"I've said all along you get better as a team by taking lessons from seasons before, from games before," Clemson coach Oliver Purnell said. "You'd like for all those lessons to be positive, but sometimes you've got to learn from losses.

"I thought that really applied tonight," he continued. "I thought we were ready for this atmosphere, we embraced it. Yet we narrowed our focus to what we needed to do to beat Duke."

And that was an end-to-end defense that disrupted the Blue Devils.

Gerald Henderson was the only one of Duke's four double-digit average scorers to hit that mark with 16, the rest, either sucked or stayed on the bus..

"It was 40 minutes of them dominating," Krzyzewski said. "They just kicked our butts."

Clemson used a 20-8 run over the last 8 minutes of the first half to take a 33-21 lead. The Tigers kept extending the lead until the final buzzer.

"It's going to be tough to top that," Booker said. "We just played great. ... They quit at the end. We just got the job done."

Duke had won 22 straight over Clemson — most in blowout fashion — since the Tigers won three straight in the series in the 1994-95 and 1995-96 seasons.