Duke coach David Cutcliffe pleased with team’s progress, responsibility after one week

Over the last week, one of Duke football coach David Cutcliffe’s “greatest concerns” has reared its head.

He watched as the Big Ten and Pac-12 postponed all fall athletics, including football, to the spring, joining a slew of lower-level conferences that had already done so. He watched as the Big 12, SEC and ACC held firm (so far) in their hopes of a fall sports season. He watched the ensuing confusion.

As a current member of the American Football Coaches Association’s Board of Trustees, Cutcliffe said it bothered him a lot — especially after, early on in college football’s reaction to the coronavirus pandemic, he had “great hopes” that the NCAA would offer a “unified approach” in its path forward.

“I do have a fear of never seeing college football be the same,” Cutcliffe said Friday in a media availability, after Duke finished its first week of fall camp. “I realize it’s 2020, and we can always recover from this … but one my greatest concerns is one group going one way, one group going the other. What are we going to see in the future? And, you know, I can’t even fathom it. But I don’t see how we could compete the same.”

“I will say that it’s a little frightening to me,” Cutcliffe continued, “because I love college football. I have all my life. And I certainly don’t want to see any drastic changes to our great game, which is a great form of amateur football that’s provided a platform for a lot of great young men … I think our leadership really needs to step up at this time.”

On a team-specific level, though, Cutcliffe said he was proud of how the Blue Devils have handled current circumstances — enough so that he said he felt “very good” about the team’s chances of completing its 11-game schedule, with its first game scheduled for Sept. 12 at Notre Dame.

Cutcliffe said Duke football players are tested for COVID-19 twice a week. The school’s athletic department reported 26 positive tests among student-athletes returning to campus last month and said in a news release Wednesday all 26 have been cleared to return to daily activities.

In the same release, Duke reported four positive COVID-19 tests among the 3,116 it has administered to returning undergraduates and graduate students since Aug. 1.

“At this point, I think the focus is on mitigation, and the bubble, so to speak,” Cutcliffe said. “We don’t have near the same circumstance that an NBA team has, but I think our players are very well aware of what their responsibilities are to each other, as is our staff.”

There’s no question, he said, that Duke is ahead of where it was last Friday when it started camp. He’s seen competition across the board, especially on the offensive line, where sophomore tackles Jacob Monk and Casey Holman are making a name for themselves in a group that also includes Jack Wohlabaugh, a 2019 All-ACC honorable mention at center.

Cutcliffe also mentioned the secondary, where veterans Mark Gilbert, Marquis Waters, Michael Carter II and Leonard Johnson have meshed well with younger defensive backs. Offensively, returners including running back Deon Jackson (900 all-purpose yards, eight touchdowns) and tight end Noah Gray (51 catches, 392 yards, three touchdowns) have picked up where they left off.

“I think when you start having difficulty telling your twos from your ones,” Cutcliffe said, “you’ve got a shot at having a good football team

At quarterback, junior Chris Katrenick has played with the first team so far while sophomore Gunnar Holmberg and Chase Brice, the highly touted graduate transfer from Clemson, have worked in reps intermittently afterward. Cutcliffe said Brice, who showed flashes over two years as Trevor Lawrence’s backup with the Tigers, has great arm talent and accuracy but is still learning Duke’s system.

“It’s tough as a quarterback,” Cutcliffe said. “(Brice) did get the benefit of some Zoom meetings, but not what the other guys got all through the spring because he was still in the process of trying to graduate (in May), so he’s catching up. He’s getting more comfortable with what we’re doing every day.”