For Duke’s new football coach, job is closer to Notre Dame than Wake. He knows both.
Mike Elko said he wasn’t trying to start any beef with Wake Forest or Dave Clawson, who he took pains to credit above and beyond any of his other mentors for taking a chance on a young assistant coach at Fordham two long decades ago.
He said that. And then he said, if not in these precise words, that in his mind Duke is more of a peer to Notre Dame than Wake Forest, both places he has coached.
“Not to disrespect anybody, I’m certainly not trying to start this thing off that way, but I think we’ll pull more off my Notre Dame experience than we will the other one,” Elko said. “Because I just think Duke means something. Anywhere you go across this country, Duke means something, and it means an awful lot in terms of excellence.”
Duke is a “national brand” — that phrase came up a lot — in everything but football, was Elko’s point, and there’s no reason that shouldn’t be true in football as well.
It was an interesting window into why Elko was willing to leave one of the highest-paid assistant coaching jobs in the country at Texas A&M to come to Duke. It was an interesting window into how far Duke football has come, these last two seasons that cost David Cutcliffe his job aside.
Think about it from Elko’s viewpoint. He’s 44. After working his way up the coaching ranks through a series of smaller schools in the northeast, he came to Wake Forest with Clawson in 2014. Duke was coming off a Coastal Division title and hung 41 points on his Deacons defense that fall.
Over the course of Elko’s entire lifetime, Duke has been a college basketball and academic powerhouse. Over the course of his personal ACC football experience, Duke has been consistently competitive and bowl-eligible.
“I’m not naive to what Duke football has been in the past,” Elko said, but that’s not what he sees now.
He doesn’t see the grim decades that followed the Steve Spurrier Experience. He doesn’t care that Duke won a lawsuit by arguing it had the worst football program in the country. He may not even know who Carl Franks is. He’s only seen Wallace Wade full of fans and optimism — and gotten his butt beat there once. That’s the job he took.
The 13-game ACC losing streak? To Elko, that’s not a return to irrelevance. It’s a correctable blip.
“What we’ve done in the past means nothing,” Elko said. “What we did last year means nothing today. This all starts fresh. We’re going to win with this group as fast as we possibly can. We don’t have a vision of the future. We don’t have a vision of this long-term rebuild.
“We have a vision of what this program looked like not too long ago when they went to six bowls in seven years and they played in the ACC championship game. That’s the vision we have.”
Some new coaches ask for patience. Elko was almost demanding impatience.
So it will be interesting to see how this change in perspective changes the atmosphere around the program. To people who have been around Duke for a minute, asking for the same environment at Wallace Wade as Cameron is a bridge too far. Basketball is one thing, football is another, and never the twain shall meet.
But someone like Elko walks in, sees that just about every other program on campus is competing for ACC and national titles, and just assumes that football should be the same way.
Which isn’t to say that wasn’t the case with Cutcliffe, but Elko’s arrival is a fresh start for more than just the coaching staff. It’s a chance to recalibrate the entire trajectory of the program. Sometimes, that takes a new voice, someone who thinks of this as Notre Dame South instead of Wake Forest East.
“The amount of ACC championships and national championships this university has brought to Durham is amazing,” Elko said. “Now it’s time for football to get on that level. It’s time for football to hold up its end of the bargain and elevate itself into being a national brand and a nationally recognized program.”
Of course, it’s one thing to say it in a press conference and another to make it work on the recruiting trail and on the football field. As these things always go, Elko will be given resources his predecessor didn’t have to hire and retain staff and recruit nationally, so he’s at least got a fighting chance to match his rhetoric with results.
That rhetoric may be a little jarring to seasoned ears, but it’s what Duke wanted from a coaching change. It’s what Duke is going to get from Elko, any ruffled feathers among his friends (and new rivals) in Winston-Salem notwithstanding.
This story was originally published December 13, 2021 at 2:05 PM.
