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Was Duke’s Rodney Hood fouled by Clemson? You make the call (VIDEO)

Tyler Thornton, Rasheed Sulaimon, Landry Nnoko

AP Photo

AP

College basketball fans love to explain how Duke gets all the calls every time there’s a call that goes Duke’s way.

That didn’t change on Friday night.

After Clemson’s Rod Hall hit a shot with nine seconds left to cap a comeback from 13 points down in the second half, Rodney Hood took the inbounds pass and went the other way, drawing a foul on K.J. McDaniels with just 3.8 seconds left on the clock. He hit a pair of free throws, giving the Blue Devils a 63-62 win.

You can see the video above. Do you think it was a foul?

The bigger issue is that Duke, once again, looked stagnant offensively late in a game. With the offensively-challenged Tyler Thornton playing crunch-time minutes with Quinn Cook strapped to the bench, the Tigers stormed back from a 47-34 deficit with just 12 minutes left in the game. In those final 12 minutes, Duke was just 5-for-14 from the floor with a pair of turnovers, which is more or less a mirror-image of the way that Duke lost to Wake Forest last week ... and North Carolina two weeks before that .. and Clemson and Notre Dame back in January.

For a team that is as talented offensively as Duke is, they can put together a head-scratching scoring drought with the best of them.

We’ve said this all season long: the Blue Devils are improved defensively, but they are still not good enough to be able to continue to withstand their crunch-time offensive woes.

Foul or not, that’s what the talking point should be as Duke heads into a semifinal matchup with N.C. State on Saturday.

Follow @robdauster