From zero to impossible heights and back, Duke one loss away from winless ACC season
There was a time, not all that long ago, when a Thursday night football game at Duke would have brought students out by the hundreds if not thousands. The stands at Wallace Wade would have been commendably full.
Honestly, it’s true!
It seems like a folk tale now, the oral history of a lost civilization. Under the savvy guidance and stubborn belief of David Cutcliffe, Duke football rose from absolute zero to heights that were not only never imagined but thought impossible, only to fall back to earth. Hard.
The only good news for Duke from its 12th straight ACC loss is very few people were there in person to witness the Blue Devils’ latest thud, allowing one of the best quarterbacking performances in college football history in a 62-22 loss to Louisville.
Malik Cunningham ran for two touchdowns and threw for two more … in the first quarter and a half. He was just getting started. Cunningham ended up becoming the second quarterback ever to throw for more than 300 yards and run for more than 200, and he generated more yards (527) and touchdowns (seven) than Washington’s Marques Tuisasosopo did in 1999.
Lamar Jackson went for 411 and 199 once. That’s one page in the Louisville record book he doesn’t own.
Up against that unstoppable force, Duke settled for field goals three times in the first half, down seven and 18 and 29. It was like sticking Band-Aids on a sucking chest wound. On the first, star back Mateao Durant was in the medical tent. Understandable. On the last, on the final play of the half, down four touchdowns, there were boos.
Immediately after, the Duke band started its halftime show with what sounded like a funeral dirge. It captured the mood nicely.
After giving up more than 60 points for the first time since 2015 and more than 40 points for the fifth straight game, there’s one chance left, next Saturday against Miami, to avoid Duke’s first winless ACC season since the one that got Ted Roof fired. When that’s over, win or lose, Cutcliffe will sit down with new athletic director Nina King — after 14 years, one Coastal Division title and three bowl wins — and learn whether he’ll be given the opportunity to try to rise again or have to give someone else a shot.
“He has the locker room 100 percent behind him,” Duke receiver Jake Bobo said. “We know who he is as a football coach. More importantly we know who he is as a man, as a human being.”
In a documentary, the scenes of tumbleweed tumbling through an empty stadium during the Carl Franks or Roof regimes would dissolve to scenes of more than 30,000 in the crowd for big-time ESPN night games against N.C. State or North Carolina. Then they would dissolve again to Thursday, when the sad smattering of fans brought everything full circle again. The stadium — renovated, polished, expanded — would look different. Everything else would look all too familiar.
While last season could easily be explained away by the disruptions caused by COVID and a bad fit at quarterback, there are fewer excuses this season. After going to five bowl games in six seasons — after zero bowls in 18 years — the new drought is at three.
“We’ve never led the ACC in talent level,” Cutcliffe said. “I don’t think we have a void where we can’t compete in the ACC at all. We have to put people in the right positions and develop them well on the field and off the field. That’s a big part of how we’ve been successful in the past. I think we’ve got some people who can win football games.”
The knives are certainly out for Cutcliffe among a vocal segment of Duke fans. They’re entitled. There’s no question that Duke, the past three seasons, hasn’t met the standard Cutcliffe himself set. But there are lamentably short memories among some of them, who seem to forget just how bad it was before he got there. Sadly, a night like this may remind them.
Still: Look around. When Cutcliffe got here, the press box and “luxury suites” were in a medical building overlooking the field. Convenient if you needed a flu shot, but not exactly up to ACC standards. A running track ran around the football field. Wallace Wade looks like a football stadium from the 21st century now, and Duke built an indoor practice facility before N.C. State or North Carolina. It also has played for an ACC championship. The Wolfpack can’t say that.
It was Louisville, pre-ACC, that sued Duke in 2007 after the Blue Devils backed out of a nonconference series with the Cardinals. Duke won the lawsuit by arguing that literally any other football program in the country would be a more attractive opponent than the woebegone Blue Devils. As the judge in the case noted, it was an argument made “with a candor perhaps more attributable to good legal strategy than to institutional modesty.”
Cutcliffe changed all that. Duke won its first bowl game since 1960. For a while, the Blue Devils were pumping out NFL talent, and not just offensive linemen. Quarterbacks, receivers, defensive backs. And yes, it isn’t ending well, but let’s not forget where it started.
There are some parallels to be drawn with Jim Grobe at Wake Forest, a coach who turned a forgotten academic backwater into a football powerhouse, then saw it all wither amid recruiting misses and staff attrition — two persistent issues that have also played a huge role in Duke’s decline.
But Grobe built a foundation — an attitude, a belief as much as anything — that Dave Clawson was able to capitalize upon. It just took a new voice and the injection of resources that always comes along with a new coach to re-energize it. Clawson’s still following the Grobe blueprint, tweaked and refined for a new era.
If this is the end for Cutcliffe, whether that’s his choice (unlikely) or someone else’s (increasingly likely), he’ll leave behind a foundation for his successor that may enable a quick return to competitiveness. Duke isn’t winning any lawsuits by arguing it’s the worst program in the country now. That part truly is ancient history. The rest of it is all too real.
This story was originally published November 18, 2021 at 10:58 PM with the headline "From zero to impossible heights and back, Duke one loss away from winless ACC season."
