There is a specific kind of March Madness player who transcends their seed and becomes the tournament. Michael Jordan did it for North Carolina in 1982. Carmelo Anthony at Syracuse in 2003. Steph Curry for Davidson in 2008 — a 10 seed that nearly knocked off Kansas. Cooper Flagg, Duke's 18-year-old freshman from Newport, Maine, is doing it in 2026, and the rare thing about it is that he's doing it as the consensus best player on the consensus best team.
Duke entered the tournament as the No. 1 overall seed. No. 1 overall seeds are not supposed to make you lean forward. You watch them out of obligation, confirming that they're winning the games they're supposed to win, waiting for the bracket chaos elsewhere. Flagg has changed that. His first-round performance against 16th-seeded Pacific — 31 points, 12 rebounds, 6 assists, including a left-handed finger roll over a 7-foot defender in the final two minutes that immediately became a GIF — was not the output of a player going through tournament motions. His second-round win over 8th-seeded Kansas State was tighter than it should have been, and Flagg's 26-point second half was what separated "upset alert" from "comfortable victory."
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