QB Chase Brice helped Clemson reach the national title game. Can he do the same at Duke?
The journey to Duke hasn’t been an easy one for Chase Brice.
The 6-2, 235-pound quarterback left Clemson, the team he helped get to a national championship in 2018, moved more than five hours away from his family and is learning to adapt to football amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Brice, who graduated from Clemson in May, is now a redshirt junior at Duke, where he is competing for the starting quarterback position. For two of his three seasons with the Tigers, he was All-ACC quarterback Trevor Lawrence’s backup. During his 25-game career at Clemson, Brice went 82-of-136 and passed for 1,023 yards, nine touchdowns and four interceptions.
Even with those stats, Brice knew he wouldn’t start over Lawrence, so he announced on Jan. 16 that he was transferring.
“Being in a place that you spent three and a half years and developed those relationships and obviously football,” Brice said in a Zoom media availability on Wednesday, “that was hard to leave.”
Seventeen days after announcing his intention to transfer, Brice decided on Duke, where he would join head coach David Cutcliffe, a legendary quarterback maker who coached retired NFL quarterbacks Peyton and Eli Manning in college and New York Giants’ Daniel Jones at Duke.
Dealing with transferring during a pandemic
Last season, the Blue Devils went 5-7 with redshirt senior quarterback Quentin Harris, who threw for 2,078 yards and 16 touchdowns with 11 interceptions on 209-of-357 yards passing. Harris graduated after the season, leaving Duke in need of a new starting quarterback.
Brice, who’s from Grayson, Georgia, about 35 miles northeast of Atlanta, said the transition of moving further away from family was made a little easier by the friends from Georgia he has at Duke. Nineteen football players — including brothers Will and John Taylor and Jalon Alexander, who also played at Grayson High School — are from Brice’s home state.
In March, as Brice worked to finish his undergraduate degree at Clemson and attended Duke’s team meetings remotely, things changed. College conferences and professional teams across the country started canceling their seasons as the coronavirus pandemic began spreading in the country.
On March 12, Duke president Vincent Price suspended all university athletics programs. The Blue Devils’ men’s basketball team withdrew from the ACC tournament before it ended up being canceled. Assistant football coach Chris Hampton said his team only had three days of spring football before transitioning to Zoom meetings.
This summer, Duke was the last ACC school to allow football players to return to campus.
“It definitely has been a challenge,” Brice told the media. “A greater challenge than any college football season that I can think of. We haven’t had anything like this.”
Duke conducted all football virtually until July 12, when voluntary workouts began. Brice said he “already learned so much since my time here, a couple months and then obviously the Zoom calls.”
“I got kind of ahead on what we were going to go through in this fall camp,” Brice said. “But so far I’ve been really pleased and hopefully (Cutcliffe) has been pleased as well with how well I kind of took control of the offense and ownership of learning the plays and what I need to know.”
Duke’s quarterback competition
Duke’s offense has several strengths, including its young and hungry wide receiver corps and deep interior. Brice has worked with those groups and said “it doesn’t matter who’s out there” because “you can’t take a route off.”
“With this offense, anybody can get the ball,” Brice said during Wednesday’s media availability. “So regardless of matchups or who I think I’d rather throw the ball to, I’m throwing to the guy that I think will be open and then I’m seeing open, trusting them and I know they’re trusting me.”
The competition for starting quarterback continues to heat up between Brice, redshirt sophomore Gunnar Holmberg and redshirt junior Chris Katrenick. But Brice said he’s focused on building relationships like those he had at Clemson because “when you all get along, you teach each other, but you’re teaching yourself in the same way.”
Brice has been implementing two approaches to how he plays with this new offense — identifying the front and learning different defenses the Blue Devils have used in the past. The quarterback competition isn’t as much about getting every play right because “you’re not going to be perfect.” It’s about not making the same mistake, learning from film, and focusing on where he is in the moment.
“I’ve done a good job with being great where my feet are, and that’s the saying that I use,” Brice said. “Just utilizing my leadership skills and ways that I can learn because I think this process has just been a huge learning curve for me and others that have decided to leave during this pandemic, and I really just held strong on that.”
While Brice uses his experiences from Clemson to navigate Duke’s program, the threat of the pandemic shutting down the season remains. It’s something that only comes up occasionally during their offensive meetings because it’s “become a norm of not knowing what’s going to be happening in the future.”
“It is kind of frustrating because you could wake up one morning and look on social media or get an update from ESPN or an email from your university that hey, we’ve shut down all fall sports for the time being, and nobody is used to that, Brice said. “How you can respond to adversity tells a lot about you and your team, your coaches.”