I have no clue but posting here anyways. After the brackets are announced I'll still probably have very little clue. I think a lot depends on Kelly's conditioning. My dent in confidence is our off/on struggle on defense. Hopefully our shooters are hot for the next few weeks.
1. On defense, in Duke's recent losses:
Joe Harris has a career night
Dez Wells drops 30
The disaster in Miami: Kadji goes crazy from 3.
Duke needs to concentrate their defense so they don't get "Bootsied"
2. On offense, Duke's losses this year seem to be due to Opponent Familiarity with Duke. ACC opponents keep trying different ways to defend Mason as well as Ryan and our outside shooters. Someone who is not as fimilar with Duke may not have time to adjust their defense to cover all of these options. Of course, like all teams in the tournament one bad shooting night and your done. This is not a weakness for Duke but a weakness for everyone in the tournament.
Well first, I fail to see how destroying a ranked team matters. Duke can beat a ranked team by 5 and still win it all. Duke isn't really built to blow out ranked teams, just beat them. Although if they get hot, they can certainly do that. But Wisconsin won't destroy a ranked team yet they just beat 2 top 10 teams in the BE tournament.
As far as Duke's run, I highly doubt many programs have a better track record than Duke does even with several disappointing runs. Only 4 teams can make the F4 and look at a team like UK who isn't even in the tourney this year. But lets look at the years you cited (and ignore the 2001 run) although it is ridiculous to rule out the 2010 run so I won't do that.
In the last 11 years, Duke has 21 wins. UNC has 27, UK has 24, MSU has 21, Indiana has 10, Syracuse 16, UCLA 17, Louisville 16, Kansas 32, Gonzaga 10, Xavier 15, Georgetown 8, Florida 20.
Forgive me if I forgot some teams but it appears KU is in a group by itself and Duke trails UNC by a half win a year or the 2001 run. And even without the 2001 title, they still have as many wins as MSU, the team who dominated the NCAAT recently or Florida who won 2 titles between then and now.
This is really all that matters and I'm not sure how many can disagree with it. No team is a real prohibitive favorite to make the F4 or win it all. Duke has maybe what a 10% chance to win it all. I'm not sure I'd put anyone way above that and from a fan of one team, sure it looks daunting but when you look at it from a universal perspective, Duke has as good a chance as any.
Same could be said of them losing in the 2nd round. Second round will feature some giant beaters and very good mid-majors. Duke has already lost to NC State and teams like Iowa State, Illinois, and Minnesota have already proven they can beat anyone on a given night. Sure Duke could lose but they'll probably be in the 65-75% favorite area according to Kenpom. So they could lose 1 in 4 times, but that is just how close these teams seem to be.
At this moment, Duke's defense is ranked 26th in Pomeroy. At this point in 2009 (just before the NCAAT), UNC's defense ranked 35th in Pomeroy and Villanova's ranked 25th. At this point in 2010, West Virginia's defense ranked 24th in Pomeroy and Michigan State's ranked 27th. At this point in 2011, Connecticut's D ranked 31st in Pomeroy, Kentucky's ranked 22nd, Butler's ranked 77th, and VCU's ranked 59th.
So that's eight teams in the last four years that made the Final Four (including two champions) with defenses either comparable to or worse than Duke's D this year.
While it's true that Duke shot below 40% from three in all five of our losses, it's also true that we won the other nine games this year in which we shot below 40% from long distance, including victories over NCAA tournament teams Florida Gulf Coast, Louisville, VCU, and UNC (twice). So I don't think it's nearly as simple as you make it out to be.
Well, first of all, this year's team's defensive rebounding is almost exactly the same as we had in 2010. This year we rebound 67.1% of our opponents' misses and in 2010 we rebounded 67.5% of our opponents' misses. Second, while its true the 2010 team didn't apply the same kind of ball pressure, that team got beat off the dribble plenty. That team still had a great defense because our bigs were excellent at rotating over to help. In the first two months of this season, before Ryan got hurt, we also had a top ten defense, in large part for the same reason. Obviously we won't know until it happens (or doesn't), but I'm hopeful our D can get back to that level with another week of practices with Ryan.