Duke coach Manny Diaz defends team’s chance at ACC football title, playoff spot
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- Duke reached the ACC title game 7-5 overall after a 6-2 conference tiebreak.
- Coach Manny Diaz asserts an ACC win would guarantee College Football Playoff.
- Duke relied on late-season resilience, key wins and favorable results elsewhere.
Duke football coach Manny Diaz didn’t hesitate Sunday when asked if the Blue Devils, if they win the ACC championship game, should be in the College Football Playoff.
“Absolutely,” he said.
The Blue Devils will take a 7-5 overall record into Saturday’s title game against No. 16 Virginia. Duke made it to Charlotte by a confluence of events that had them go 6-2 in the ACC and win the tiebreaker to claim the second spot in the championship game.
“It’s not by accident,” Diaz said on an ACC media call. “Everybody agreed to the rules of engagement, right? We play in a conference, and we all agreed to how we sort out who the top two teams are, and through the rules we ended up being one of the top two.”
The rub: Winning the ACC is no guarantee for entry into the CFP for Duke. If not one of the five highest ranked conference champions, the Blue Devils could be left out of the playoffs under the current CFP format.
After a 49-32 win over Wake Forest, the Blue Devils’ chances of getting to Charlotte still seemed slim.
The Blue Devils needed California to top SMU to get in, and the Mustangs were favored. Miami already had beaten Pittsburgh. Virginia was beating Virginia Tech. For Duke, it came down to the Golden Bears winning at home against SMU for the computations to favor Devils.
Diaz said he was watching the Virginia game, just in case, and the Cal-SMU game, the crux game for the Blue Devils. But could SMU pull it off?
“The whole mindset was ‘Nah, there’s no way’ it could happen,” he said. “Then another play happens and it’s, ‘Uh … no, it’s not going to happen.’ And then SMU made a great comeback.”
But Cal won, 38-35. The Bears, who fired head coach Justin Wilcox last week, got the go-ahead touchdown in the final minute from Kendrick Raphael, a former N.C. State running back. They then held on as SMU’s Sam Keltner was wide-right on a 52-yard field goal attempt with eight seconds left.
“Everybody was home by then and the group chat got pretty exciting,” Diaz said.
Duke, which last won an ACC title in 1989 with Steve Spurrier the coach, could start making plans for Charlotte and a rematch against the Cavaliers (10-2), who had a 7-1 ACC record and beat Duke, 34-17.
Duke’s possible entry into the College Football Playoff was quickly panned by some in the national media and the source of much social media chatter, much of it mocking.
A five-loss team in the playoffs?
It was noted that under the CFP format, say, James Madison of the Sun Belt or Tulane from the AAC could win their respective leagues, be higher ranked than Duke and one of them keep the Blue Devils out.
Diaz was quick to defend the Blue Devils during Sunday’s call. “We lost to two 10-win teams, two 9-win teams and an 8-win team,” he said. “Two of our losses were one-score games on the road to a Group of Five school.”
The one-score losses were to Tulane early in the season and later Connecticut. Diaz warned such nonconference scheduling models could change should the Blue Devils beat Virginia, win the conference title and be shut out in the CFP.
“If the whole argument is should a Group of Five school be in the playoff at the ACC’s expense, well, you can forget about ever booking home-and-home game and encouraging teams to go play good competition home and away,” he said. “We could have just scheduled better and had nine wins.
“We have had a schedule that has challenged us. We had a schedule that I think has improved us as the year has gone on. ... And we have learned through the losses, and are absolutely worthy of being in Charlotte on Saturday night and whatever happens after that.”
All is moot if the Blue Devils can’t find a way to play better against the Cavaliers than they did a few weeks ago when Virginia came to Durham on Nov. 15 and had a dominant 60-minute performance.
“By far our worst game and Virginia was outstanding,” Diaz said.
The Blue Devils, who have an explosive offense, were muzzled, finishing with 11 first downs, 42 yards rushing and a season-worst 255 yards in total offense. Duke’s defense, in turn, could not contain Virginia quarterback Chandler Morris (316 yards passing), running back J’Mari Taylor (133 yards rushing) or wide receiver Trell Harris (8 catches, 181 yards) — the Cavaliers had 540 yards in total offense.
“After the Virginia game, Charlotte was really an afterthought,” Diaz said. “Our big re-focus was ‘Let’s win a football game, let’s beat North Carolina.’”
It helped that the Blue Devils, trailing Virginia 31-3 in the second half, did not meekly play out the game. Quarterback Darian Meshah had a TD throw to wideout Cooper Barkate, and linebacker Tre Freeman ran back an interception of a Morris pass for a score.
Diaz said after the game that while the Devils were badly disappointed, he liked his team’s “fight” in the fourth quarter, when all was lost but the competitive pride remained.
“Knowing that they still had a backbone there, that they were still playing hard for one another, it made you feel you still had something,” he said. “We had to do some major psychological work in the 24 hours after that game. The older guys still realized what was still out there to play for.”
The Blue Devils went to Chapel Hill and topped UNC, 32-25, then finished strong in the second half to beat Wake Forest at Wallace Wade Stadium.
“Since our game, they’ve gotten back in rhythm,” Virginia coach Tony Elliott said Sunday.
Next stop: Charlotte and Bank of America Stadium. There’s a championship to be won and then “whatever” as Diaz put it
This story was originally published November 30, 2025 at 7:13 PM.
