Brownlow: Duke ends season with cathartic win, looks ahead with optimism to Elko's Year 2
Posted December 31, 2022 2:22 p.m. EST
There are plenty of statistics you can throw out when a head coach does a good job with Duke football to prove it. Because there's been plenty of bad before it.
Former head coach David Cutcliffe used to be on the good side of those stats after he turned around the Duke program. But Duke entered 2022 with a brand-new head coach in Mike Elko, a team that had gone 1-17 in its last 18 league games and hadn't made a bowl since 2018. And even including that season, Duke's peak had been a .500 finish in league play. A far cry from the team that won the Coastal in 2013.
The last time Duke walked off the field in the Cutcliffe era, it was clear something needed to change. Duke had lost four in a row to end the season by an average of 31 points. It looked a lot more like the Duke football of old that once successfully argued in court it was the worst program in the nation before it hired Cutcliffe.
There were a ton of question marks: was it the talent level? Or was it that leadership had grown stale and the buy-in had dropped off?
At best, it seemed, it was some of both. Except Elko took a lot of those same players, many of which he'll have back in 2023, and turned them into a 9-4 football team that won more ACC games in a year than it had in the previous three years combined.
"Couldn't be more proud of this group," Elko said after his team's 30-13 win over UCF in the Military Bowl, the program's first bowl win since 2017. "From where this team was and this program was walking off the field at the end of the 2021 season to walking off the field today as the 2022 Military Bowl champions, nobody can understand the amount of work and the amount of character that went into that."
Elko, a very successful defensive coordinator at Notre Dame and Texas A&M, was a home-run hire by Duke athletic director Nina King. And he hired well too, bringing in offensive coordinator Kevin Johns from Memphis. Johns implemented an run-pass option attack that utilized sophomore quarterback Riley Leonard's skill set perfectly and Duke had its highest yards per rush average since at least 2008, adding a program-record 31 touchdowns on the ground.
Leonard's dual-threat ability was a big part of the Blue Devils' success, and he's expected back in 2023.
Cutcliffe had breathed life into Duke with his offensive ingenuity, but even that had hit a wall. Duke's highest scoring average from 2016-21 was 29.4 points, good for 64th nationally. Duke was 80th or worse every other year in that stretch and had fallen to just 22.8 points per game in 2021.
Johns and Leonard and company increased Duke's scoring average from 22.8 to 32.8. Again, with a lot of the same players. It's remarkable. The last time Duke had hit that mark was 2013.
Duke football used to be content with moral victories, and understandably so. But it was markedly different this year as Duke players continually referenced their close loss to North Carolina as a missed opportunity to have won the Coastal Division, which was in reach without that loss. A play here or there go differently and that's all it would have taken.
Three of Duke's four losses were by eight points or fewer, and three were to teams that were ranked at one point this season, two when Duke faced them.
So what's wilder than nine wins after what Duke put on the field in recent years is that it could have easily been 10 or 11. Three of Duke's ACC wins were by double digits, leaving no doubt.
A big key to Duke's success was in an area that doesn't seem super obvious: turnover margin.
Turnovers had become a huge issue in recent years for Duke. The COVID year in 2020 when things became truly broken? Duke lost a ridiculous 39 turnovers in 11 games, finishing 125th out of 130 teams in turnover margin in spite of forcing 20.
Duke had not finished a season with a positive turnover margin since 2017 and had a negative margin all but once from 2015-21. Cutcliffe's last three teams lost 80 turnovers in three seasons and gained just 51.
Cutcliffe came in and fixed the little things when he started at Duke, including tightening up turnovers. When that started to slip, it's no coincidence that Duke did too. And having a turnover margin like that is not only a recipe for losing football, it's also a recipe for losing by a lot of points football.
But this year? Duke was No. 2 in the nation in turnover margin, gaining 26 and losing just 10.
Sixteen of those 26 were fumble recoveries, which can have a good bounce element to them. But the losing just 10 part? That's important, and it is something that can carry over. Duke learned how to value the football in a way it hadn't in years in just a few months under Elko.
While the coaching staff deserves a ton of credit, Duke's players do too. The ones who stuck around are the same ones who have had to suffer through plenty of embarrassment the last few seasons. Those players could have gone elsewhere instead of deciding to trust in a new coaching staff that all would be well when it had been far from it for quite some time.
Transfer safety Darius Joiner, though, took a leap of faith. "I had no clue that when I came to Duke (that) we were going to be what we are," Joiner said. "I trusted the vision Coach Elko had. It made me work hard every day. We’re going to get better every day and set the standard even higher next year."
The offense got the attention, but Duke's defense allowed just 5.5 yards per play after allowing 7.1 last year, ranking 123rd nationally. And plenty of players played on both defenses.
Duke's reward was a dominating win in a bowl game and nine wins for just the second time since World War II.
Opt-outs were not an issue, even though the bowl game might have been "meaningless" on paper. It wasn't meaningless to Duke.
"This is not a day in age where people grind through hard times, where people stay and stick together. Everybody in our organization that ended the season showed up here today to be a part of this bowl, every coach and player, and you don’t see that," Elko said.
"This group is special and this program is special and what this university’s football team is going to be about in the future. I think today was just a testament to all of that: a lot of great culture, great character and then some really good football."
As long as Elko stays at Duke, the Blue Devils will have a chance to have a special season. And if the roster can stay as intact as it appears that it will in spite of the transfer portal adding players every day, there's no reason to put a limit on what Duke can accomplish.
Teams will try to entice him with ridiculous contracts that Duke may or may not match. But if Duke can keep him long-term, it will have a chance to build on the success of this season and refuse to look back.
"What a way to end this first story of Duke football but now, it’s on to the next of bigger and better things," Elko said.
