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Duke in National Title Chase

bobknightfan said:
Your problem...and that of many others on this board...is that you suffer from illusions of grandeur about what is reasonably possible for WF in the revenue sports of football & basketball.....and particularly in football. And your knee-jerk reaction is to attack anyone who tries to point out these realities to you.
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We are 1 bball recruit away from being national title contenders.
 
Yeah...if Wake lands Giles they will be preseason top 10 in two years without question.
 
bkf was happier about Wake basketball during the [Redacted] era than any other time I can remember on this board.
 
The premise of this thread is ridiculous. Duke might run the table, but that simply means they are the best out if a group of bad teams. If they finish with one or two losses, they deserve as much respect as ECU: a good team that is no where near championship contender. Clemson is a far better program, and they aren't close either.
 
bobknightfan said:
I'm not denigrating WF. I'm just stating facts. I said that those Duke seasons were in the distant past...but at least they give Duke some historical tradition in football that WF has never, ever had. More important are money & alumni. What are the comparable numbers for living alumni from which to generate money necessary to build a consistently respectable program? What the comparable school endowments?

Your problem...and that of many others on this board...is that you suffer from illusions of grandeur about what is reasonably possible for WF in the revenue sports of football & basketball.....and particularly in football. And your knee-jerk reaction is to attack anyone who tries to point out these realities to you.
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Hands down the most important factor in college sports is the coaching staff, and the head coach in particular. That's why you can put a bad coach in charge of UNC hoops and they'll go 8-20, or put a good coach in charge of Butler and they'll go to back-to-back national championship games. Or put Bill Snyder in charge of k-state football and they'll go from one of the worst teams to a great team, then take him away and they'll start losing again and hire him back and they'll start back winning. There are innumerable examples of this - ucla bball, Kentucky bball, Florida bball, Alabama football, Vandy football, etc. Yes, some schools have built in advantages such as location, conference, etc, but the coach is much, much more important, in my opinion.
 
I welcome Duke football success. Mainly because another can tell the Tarholes to suck it.
 
Duke is the only Power 5 team in the country (that I see at least) who has a strength of schedule in triple digits (they're 100th) according to Sagarin. They're ranked 35th overall there and ranked 37th in the predictor. They're one spot ahead of Marshall. Of teams in the top 40 the only non-Big 10 teams ranked worse than 50th in SOS are Baylor, Louisville, and Duke. The Big 10 has some awful teams at the bottom apparently or these teams just play scrubs in the non-conference because the Big 10 has like 5 or 6 teams in the top 40 with a schedule easier than the 50th.

Duke is 3-1 in the ACC and here are the following point differentials of teams above .500 in conference play:

FSU: 90
Clemson: 70
Georgia Tech: 56
Louisville: 43
Miami: 34
Boston College: 10
Duke: 4

I'm not a statistical expert, but regression might be coming soon. Duke has won every close game they've played (generally teams end up being around .500 in these games over the long run). They have an absurdly easy schedule (crossover games are Syracuse and Wake) and play Syracuse, VPI, UNC, and Wake coming home.

I bet they go 2-2 and finish up at 9-3. I'm still pretty convinced 5-3 will win the Coastal. I credit them for winning the games on the schedule but it's not like they have any good wins other than beating another top 40 team on the road in Georgia Tech. If Duke wins out and beats Florida State, they'll be a borderline top 10 team with voters and probably around the 25th best team statistically.
 
The fact they've now done it two years in a row does at least suggest it isn't ALL luck. A significant component? Of course. But they've found a style of play that works for them -- much like we would constantly let our opponents try and drive for game-winning drives during Grobe's heyday, and they would either screw up or our D would make a big play.

That style only had a three-year shelf life of working due to our personnel on D and the lack of talent on other squads during that time (oh, and a dude named Riley). We'll see if Duke can keep theirs up longer
 
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wsc8521s said:
The fact they've now done it two years in a row does at least suggest it isn't ALL luck. A significant component? Of course. But they've found a style of play that works for them -- much like we would constantly let our opponents try and drive for game-winning drives during Grobe's heyday, and they would either screw up or our D would make a big play.

That style only had a three-year shelf life of working due to our personnel on D and the lack of talent on other squads during that time. We'll see if Duke can keep theirs up longer
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They certainly have a good game plan. They've also beaten up on bad teams and play in a relatively weak division in the Coastal.

Over the past season and a half they've played 22 games and are 17-5 which is good for anybody (obviously). Here's how those wins break down and this uses Sagarin as the rating method since human polls are generally awful:

Record against teams ranked 1-25: 0-2 (FSU and TAMU last year)
Record against teams ranked 26-50: 4-2 (last year beat UNC, Miami, and VPI, this year beat GT. Lost to GT last year and Miami this year)
Record against teams ranked 51-100: 6-1
Record against teams ranked 101+: 7-0

So Duke is 13-1 against teams ranked worse than 51 and 4-4 against teams in the top 50. I can't imagine there's another Power 5 team who has played seven games against teams ranked worse than 100, much less won seven games.

Again, I'm not taking anything away from Duke but they're just beating up on bad teams. The best part of their overall resume is that they're 6-1 against teams between 51-100 which indicates that they've solidified themselves as a pretty solid top 50 team. The funniest part is they've only played 8 games against teams ranked in the top 50 and 2 games against top 25 teams. 2 out of 22 is seemingly an impossibly low rate for playing top 25 teams.

ETA: While the SEC West is an anomaly because of how difficult it is, if you want to see what Duke would do with a difficult schedule just look at Arkansas this year. Duke and Arkansas are one spot apart in total Sagarin and Arkansas is ten spots better in predictor - so they're generally equivalent and Arkansas may even be a little bit better (would be favored by around four on a neutral field). Duke is 7-1 with an inside track to play in the ACCCG and Arkansas is 4-5 and has to win two of three against LSU, Ole Miss, and Missouri just to make a bowl.
 
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Yeah, I mean I agree, their schedule is weak. As it was for us in '06.

We did make more of an effort to schedule quality OOC teams than Cutcliffe has, though that will improve over the next couple years as they have a four-game series with Northwestern and a H&H with Baylor upcoming
 
Arkansas is not good. I like to look at Sagarin but my eye test tells me his system has some major flaws, like saying the UGA team that got gashed by the most one dimensional attack I've ever seen is better than FSU. Or saying aTm is 18th best team after getting blown out three straight weeks and hanging on for dear life at home against La Monroe.
 
At least in 2006 we had 2 wins over top 25 teams and played 4 total. At best Duke will play 2 total, and Pitt should have been their 2nd loss to an unranked opponent. Don't remember anyone making the argument that Wake was in the National Title chase in 2006, which makes the argument that Duke is this year all the more ridiculous.
 
Pretty sure that Wake, Clemson, FSU, Maryland and BC were all top 50 teams in 06. The Atlantic that year was much more difficult top to bottom than the Coastal has been the last two years. Plus we played VT and GT from the other division, the two best teams.
 
duck fook! Lucky bastards should have lost at Pitt and this title talk would have all been put to bed already.

Would love for the Deacs to catch them snoozing on tryptophan after Thanksgiving and hang an "L" on them!:D
 
wsc8521s said:
Yeah, I mean I agree, their schedule is weak. As it was for us in '06.

We did make more of an effort to schedule quality OOC teams than Cutcliffe has, though that will improve over the next couple years as they have a four-game series with Northwestern and a H&H with Baylor upcoming
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I can't find the final 2006 Sagarin ratings for consistency sakes, but according to teamrankings Wake played the 5th hardest adjusted SOS in the country in 2006.
 
I fail to see how Arkansas is "not good." They've lost five games by a total of 52 points and 24 of those were in a road opener at Auburn, a top five team in the nation. Their other losses are to TAMU on the road by a touchdown in OT, a one point loss to a top five Alabama team at home, a 13 point home loss to Georgia, and a seven point loss on the road to a top five Mississippi State team.

Should Arkansas have snuck out one or two of those games? Maybe, but I'm not arguing they're a national championship contender, just that they're around the 30-40th best team in the country like Duke. I mean what record would Duke have in five games:

@ Auburn
@ TAMU
Alabama
Georgia
@ Mississippi State
 
Wakeforest22890 said:
I fail to see how Arkansas is "not good." They've lost five games by a total of 52 points and 24 of those were in a road opener at Auburn, a top five team in the nation. Their other losses are to TAMU on the road by a touchdown in OT, a one point loss to a top five Alabama team at home, a 13 point home loss to Georgia, and a seven point loss on the road to a top five Mississippi State team.

Should Arkansas have snuck out one or two of those games? Maybe, but I'm not arguing they're a national championship contender, just that they're around the 30-40th best team in the country like Duke. I mean what record would Duke have in five games:

@ Auburn
@ TAMU
Alabama
Georgia
@ Mississippi State
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Ummmm.....0-5!
 
Wakeforest22890 said:
Yeah...if Wake lands Giles they will be preseason top 10 in two years without question.
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This may not be the right thread for this, but I hear people say this about our projected '16-'17 team a lot, but it seems pretty premature. We need to hope that some of these guys prove themselves as ACC caliber players before we can project like that, especially the 4-star guys. For the most part, the only sure things are the top 5-star guys, of which we will have 1. Not trying to be a hater, because I love the direction our program is going (and obviously the more 4-star guys we have, the more likely that they work out for us), I'm just not sure it's that easy to be a national championship contender with no veteran stars, just because we have 1 elite recruit. Most likely, we will lose our two best players and top scorers from the year before which is a lot of production to replace if we expect to get much better.

Projected roster:
Crawford Wilbekin/Chill
Parker Wilbekin/Chill
McClinton Hudson
Giles Collins
Moore Dinos

Outside of Giles, I don't think we can be sure about any of those guys.
 
Duke did a few things in 06/07 that was a direct result of Wake's success. As Roof was fired, Alleva the AD wanted to hire the fired coach at UCLA, Dorrell. The Duke BOT had an emergency meeting and basically took the hiring out of Alleva's hands. Cutcliffe was hired, and in turn, handed the keys to the program. Alleva was fired/let go/left pretty soon after. Sounded to me at the time Duke was tired of losing, and did so by getting rid of a pretty poor AD. This is the exact scenario that I have been hoping for ever since I heard the word [Redacted].
 
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