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Taking a Look at Duke's FB Prgram

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80deac

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I have said for 3 seasons now that we should take seriously what Duke was accomplishing as an overall program. They have made unbeliable strides in this period of time in all aspects of the program. First, take a look at the current 247 national recruiting rankings for the conference for 2016:

3 FSU
10 Miami
(15 Notre Dame)
21 DUKE
24 Clemson
25 UNC
26 Louisville
34 VT
41 UVa
45 WF
54 BC
55 Syracuse
60 NCSU
65 Pitt
70 GT

Even though we were improving late last season, Duke was able to win fairly easily in Durham due to the quick consecutive scoring fueled by a surprise on-side kick and a fumbled punt return by us deep in our territory. The game was tied 7-7 in the first quarter until they scored 3 times in a row. Duke took control with two touchdowns in 9 seconds in the first quarter off these miscues.

As most of you are aware, through recent history, our games with them are usually close regardless of overall W/Ls when we play. Duke blew their chance at the ACC title game last year by being upset at home to a mediocre UNC team. Their best win was away at GT who was very good last year. The year before they made it to the title game but lost 45-7 to national champ FSU and took Johnny Manziel and Texas A&M to the wire in their Chick-Fil-a Bowl game.

So, where do we stand in comparison today? Well, after the BC game, not as bad as I thought. IOW, we are not as far behind them overall as it seemed. Take the recent BC game. We both played BC on consecutive weeks so not a lot of change in personnel. If anything, our loss of Hinton was the biggest negative. But the games were very similar and each could have been easily won by BC. BC was holding Duke scoreless in the 2nd half (....and Duke never crossed the goal-line, either, like us). Below are the comparative stats:

Duke BC WF BC

R 33 164 33 196
P 195 141 109 74
T 228 305 147 270

BC outgained us both but Duke allowed more passing yards. Duke rushed the exact same yardage as we did. Also, We played on BC's home field and Duke got them at home.

So, I like our chances at 6 wins and what Clawson has done from year 1 to year 2. I feel like we at least have a shot at Louisville and NC State and if things stay the same, the game with Duke should be a toss-up.
 
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Remember when we were good? And then when Grobe just stopped trying and retired in place?
 
The funny thing is that the rumor was that when we had our run from 2006-08 that Duke looked at what we were doing and that helped start their upswing. Funny how much things have changed in 9 years.
 
The lucky thing that Duke did was hire David Cutcliffe and then allow him to assemble a good staff with a good recruiting budget. It is not rocket science.
 
bcobbdeacs said:
The lucky thing that Duke did was hire David Cutcliffe and then allow him to assemble a good staff with a good recruiting budget. It is not rocket science.
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Is it luck or is it just a super easy thing (making a great hire and devoting lots of resources)?
 
They are taking advantage of having an average team in a terrible division with an awful OOC schedule. Duke beat 8 teams last year with a losing record. They have yet to play a team that will have a winning record this year. They last time they played Clemson and/or FSU was 2012 and they lost by a combined 77 points.
 
LCDeacon said:
They are taking advantage of having an average team in a terrible division with an awful OOC schedule. Duke beat 8 teams last year with a losing record. They have yet to play a team that will have a winning record this year. They last time they played Clemson and/or FSU was 2012 and they lost by a combined 77 points.
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A lot of people said that's what we did in 2006.
 
bcobbdeacs said:
The lucky thing that Duke did was hire David Cutcliffe and then allow him to assemble a good staff with a good recruiting budget. It is not rocket science.
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The luck is with Beamer/London/Golden on the other side of the field.
 
liveanddiedeac said:
A lot of people said that's what we did in 2006.
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We did kinda, it was certainly a perfect storm. Unfortunately for Duke they aren't going to play GT in the championship game if they make it that far.

Edit: We certainly played a much tougher schedule that Duke is, and beat ranked teams, but we did benefit from coaches who were on the way out and floundering like Beamer.
 
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RacerDeac said:
Remember when we were good? And then when Grobe just stopped trying and retired in place?
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I don't think it all falls on Grobe, I think it was top down from the Admin. Instead of taking advantage of one of the few times we've had momentum with the football program I think from the top down there was an attitude was "we'll just keep status quo and be alright."
 
LCDeacon said:
We did, it was certainly a perfect storm. Unfortunately for Duke they aren't going to play GT in the championship game if they make it that far.

Edit: We certainly played a much tougher schedule that Duke is, and beat ranked teams, but we did benefit from coaches who were on the way out and floundering like Beamer.
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Agree with your edit. We also had a lot of bounces go our way that year.
 
TownieDeac said:
And they would be wrong. We played 5 ranked teams over the course of that year and beat 3 of them.
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I agree, we were a very good football team that year and we could play with just about anybody. Leading up to the Orange Bowl the pundits were all saying Louisville and their high powered offense would run us out of the stadium and as it turned out, take away the costly fumbles we win that game. Louisville certainly wasn't much better than us.

Forgot to add that crazy turn of events that cost us the game against Clemson that we were completely in control of until the mishandled snap on the FG attempt.
 
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Grobe's style of believing our defense could close out games also worked well that year since the QBs we were dealing with that year included Daniel Evans, Joe Dailey, Sam Hollenbach and Reggie Ball.

The strategy didn't work so well when other team's QBs improved to not-godawful levels
 
wsc8521s said:
Grobe's style of believing our defense could close out games also worked well that year since the QBs we were dealing with that year included Daniel Evans, Joe Dailey, Sam Hollenbach and Reggie Ball.

The strategy didn't work so well when other team's QBs improved to not-godawful levels
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Don't be dissing on Sam Hollenbach, kid was a baller!
 
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