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A scythe has dogged Coach K’s career since he announced his retirement plan last July. Duke’s last Mike Krzyzewski-era Final Four came to a horrific end on Saturday night. Caleb Love was also a well-known hunter in UNC’s 81-77 win over their arch-rival.
This was easily the worst Duke loss of the Coach-K era, and Love’s role in kiboshing his career increased its potency exponentially. Worse than Eric Maynor, who showed up near the top of the key to defeat Duke in the first round of the 2007 NCAA tournament. Worse than CJ McCollum, who leads a No. 15 seed ahead of Duke. Getting dumped by Mercer’s nerds was a kick in the gonads. UNC and Caleb Love came in with more sadistic intentions.
UNC and Duke spent the second half exchanging buckets and leads for most of the second half. With a narrow one-point lead, Love paused near midfield with 34 seconds left to dribble down the clock, scanning the floor, driving his defender into a hard screen from RJ Davis, rising off the top of the key and sinking the coup de grace. The Dagger of Love unleashed bloodthirsty screams from the Duke fandom, followed by a deafening silence. Any traumatized Duke fan will be describing their therapist for the next decade over Love’s shot and whereabouts.
Channeling Mike Myers, Jason Vorhees or the fisherman from I Know What You Did Last Summer, Love is a slasher who’s been holding that dagger for a while. He’s spent the last two years saving his most reckless performances for Duke. There have been fiendish villains in Duke UNC lore, but Love’s is perhaps the most interesting.
Two years ago, Love’s affinity for Duke ran deep. His father told Benjamin Hochman of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in 2020 that “Caleb’s dream school was Duke.” He added, “Coach K came here, we thought it was going to happen and then it didn’t.”
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The heels sophomore point guard only made a commitment to UNC during his senior year at Christian Brothers High School, where he was coached by Jayson Tatum’s father, after Duke received an acceptance letter from Jeremy Roach.
“Before Jeremy signed on, they just told me they wanted me to be the point guard for them, get my teammates involved and come in and fight to win a national championship.” Love told TheDevilsDen.com’s Steve Clark after Roach committed in May 2019.
Love was the No. 2 point guard in her class in 2020, according to 247 Sports, which put Jeremy Roach in fourth place. The only point guard before Love was Cade Cunningham. ESPN’s recruiting database considered Love its 18th top recruit, and Roach was ranked 19th. When Roach was offered by Duke two years prior to his enrollment and signed a year later, Love chose the Carolina blue.
Coach K was arguably the largest college hoops recruiter of the last 40 years. The point guard he spurned, who is the difference between Duke rising to a picture-book finish and UNC establishing himself as a historic 8-seed, is an indelible dent in Krzyzewski’s lore, which, along with Roach’s eight points and unrepairable will be 18 percent shooting.
Love’s highlight of the season as a freshman was a win over Duke. Two of his three highest-scoring games have now been played against Duke. On February 6, 2021, he broke out with 25 points in his first win against Duke. He was hovering an average of 10 points per game up to that point and shooting 35 percent from the field. That night he shot 56.3 percent from field and 4 of 5 from behind the arc. He did it again a month later, scoring 18 on 50 percent shooting and dishing out seven assists in UNC’s 18-point win.
The only blemish on Love’s record against Duke was the meager eight points he scored during a February 5 loss in which he lost just 3 of 5 tries and shot 1-5 from deep.
He responded by crashing Coach K’s home finals celebration. Love scored 22 goals, fueled by his perfect 12-on-12 shooting at the free-throw line, but Duke’s total obliteration overshadowed him. Love’s 28 points on 11-of-20 shooting from the field was even more remarkable when weighed against the burden imposed by Armando Bacot’s inner struggles to excel.
No matter what Caleb Love does from that point on, he’s a folk hero for half the UNC Duke-UNC divide and has etched himself in the memories of Duke fandom as a horror.