Duke football finishes with flourish, reaches 8 wins in 34-31 victory over Wake Forest
Almost 11 months have passed since Mike Elko became Duke’s head coach, and entered into what appeared last December to be one of college football’s most daunting challenges. The Blue Devils won but five games in the previous two seasons before his arrival, and the more they declined toward the end of David Cutcliffe’s otherwise successful tenure, the longer it seemed like it would take for them to climb out of the abyss.
Elko thought about that after the final regular-season game Saturday night, after his team’s 34-31 victory against Wake Forest here at Wallace Wade Stadium. He thought about the perception surrounding his program when he arrived, and he sounded almost insulted by the memory of low expectations, as if he felt patronized by the low-bar hope, among outsiders, that perhaps Duke might be able to be a little more competitive than it had been.
“You guys thought I was crazy in the beginning of the year,” Elko said, addressing reporters and others during his postgame press conference, “because you wanted me to get up here and just tell you that we’re just going to go out there and try hard. And hopefully once the ball will break our way, and we’ll win a couple games.
“And you guys wanted that to be what this program was about. And it just won’t be; it’ll never be that way, as long as I’m the head football coach. And so we’re going to compete, and we’re going to fight and we’re going to battle and we’ll see what happens.”
Elko had just watched his team win the sort of game the Blue Devils had so often lost in recent seasons, one that tested their fortitude and resilience, and he sounded not like a man content to celebrate but one who wanted to keep competing, and maybe coach another three hours or so. He was on a roll, unable to contain his pride in his players, talking about how “we will have toughness, and we will have grit,” and certainly those attributes were a part of Duke’s escape Saturday night.
Those and Riley Leonard, the sophomore quarterback who threw for 391 yards and four touchdowns. The last of them spanned 20 yards and landed comfortably in Sahmir Hagans’ grasp with about two minutes to play, sending a sparse but lively home crowd into a bit of delirium. Only about 17,500 spectators showed up here Saturday night and, undoubtedly, increasing fan support is among Elko’s primary objectives.
Performances like Saturday night, and seasons like this one, will help. Duke’s eight regular-season victories are its most since 2014, when it won nine games, and the eight wins are the Blue Devils’ most, overall, since 2018. That season happened to be Cutcliffe’s final winning season, after which began a long, painful slide to the sort of depths Duke experienced throughout much of the 1990s and 2000s.
Elko, who’d been the defensive coordinator at Texas A&M, arrived with the mission of resurrecting a program that earned a reputation for overachieving in Cutcliffe’s best seasons. Even so, most expected the process to be a slow one, and when Elko said, in his introductory statement last December, that “I believe the time is now for Duke football,” it sounded like the sort of coach speak not meant to be taken literally. Turns out, he meant it quite literally.
“We didn’t come into this thing this year with lesser goals,” he said Saturday.
In a little less than a full year, Elko has changed the attitudes and beliefs of the players he inherited, all of whom decided to stick around and play for him. In the not-so-distant past, Duke had developed a taste for losing, almost an expectation of it. The Blue Devils played as though they sensed something bad might happen, eventually. Now, though, “what stands out the most to me is we go into every single game expecting to win,” said Leonard, who perhaps more than any other player has been most responsible for Duke’s turnaround.
In previous seasons, Leonard said, some of his teammates played with “predetermined things in their head,” and those things were otherwise known as negative thoughts. Now, he said, “the winning mentality ... was definitely the biggest change this year.”
To Elko, the victory Saturday night “just kind of epitomized our whole season,” and that was because he found it to be familiar in its grittiness. The Blue Devils led by double-digits twice before squandering their lead, completely, during an eight-minute span at the end of the third quarter and beginning of the fourth. They reclaimed the lead, for good, with two minutes remaining, on Leonard’s pass to Hagans.
Duke’s winning drive began after it forced a punt, and then the Blue Devils stopped Sam Hartman and Wake Forest again in the final minutes, with Darius Joiner intercepting Hartman’s last-gasp attempt on a fourth down play with 82 seconds remaining. In recent seasons, Hartman and Wake had set the standard among the smaller private schools in the ACC. The Demon Deacons played for the ACC championship last season and entered into the top 10 earlier this season.
Their loss to Duke, though, was their fourth in five games — and first against the Blue Devils since 2017. It felt a little like a changing of the guard, as though Duke is prepared to take Wake’s place, or at least join it, as the thorn in the side of bigger schools, with bigger fan bases. Leonard, like Hartman before him, will have a chance in the coming years to produce gaudy numbers, “and I always knew he was special,” said Jalon Calhoun, a Duke receiver who on Saturday caught 11 passes for 174 yards and a touchdown. Calhoun used the same adjective to describe the team.
“We always knew we could be special,” he said. “It was just putting the right pieces in, and getting the coaching back to where it needs to be.”
That appeared settled. Whatever malaise afflicted Duke in the final seasons of Cutcliffe’s tenure seems to have been cured. The Blue Devils remain a work in progress — they allowed 453 yards Saturday, to Wake’s 503 — but they proved themselves more capable, and competitive, than anyone would’ve expected after they were picked to finish last in the ACC’s Coastal Division. Well, anyone aside from Elko and those he’d convinced to believe.
“Our kids just keep fighting,” Elko said. “I don’t know how many times we can say it. I don’t know how many times they can prove it. But they will not blink and they will not stop coming.”
Saturday offered additional proof, for any lingering doubters. Duke found a way to win with a late score, again. It came up with a decisive defensive stop, again. When he arrived almost a year ago, Elko said he quickly learned that among his players “there’s a lot of fight in there.”
Now, others are seeing what he saw all along. It’s part of why Elko always expected more than most believed possible.
This story was originally published November 26, 2022 at 6:51 PM.
