No one is shocked that Duke is in the ACC title race. History says we should be
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Duke overcame a 2000s-era collapse to become a legitimate ACC title contender.
- Targeted coaching hires and facility spending reversed decades of recruiting decline.
- Recent wins, including first Clemson victory since 1980, keep Duke in ACC race.
The time when Duke itself argued that it had the absolute worst football program in the country is an old story, but enough time has passed and so much has fundamentally changed that it’s worth revisiting.
In 2007, Louisville sued Duke for backing out of the final three games of a scheduled four-game contract, back when that was a nonconference game. The Blue Devils had lost the first game 40-3 in 2002, and when the next game came up in 2007, Duke refused to play it and also refused to pay the penalty in the contract, arguing that any opponent Louisville could find would be a better opponent than its own program, which at that point had lost 62 of its previous 71 games.
Duke’s lawyers actually made that argument on the record, in a court of law, and saved Duke $450,000 when a Kentucky judge agreed with Duke in 2008: Its football program was indeed as bad as it gets anywhere, if not worse.
Seventeen years, three bullseye coaching hires and many millions of investment later, the Blue Devils have the most stable, most competitive and most (realistically) ambitious program in the state, still with a shot at playing for the ACC title with four games to play and coming off nine-, eight- and nine-win seasons.
David Cutcliffe legitimized the program, the university poured money into it, Mike Elko revitalized it and Manny Diaz is running with it.
Duke survived the Elko-to-Diaz transition without blinking, spent a reported $8 million on quarterback Darian Mensah and has become a textbook case in how to manage a football program in the 2025 football economy, even in the shadow of a more popular, more famous basketball program that will always be the alpha on campus.
After a weekend when all three Triangle teams won big ACC games, two on the road, the other over a top-10 team at home, Duke’s first win at Clemson since 1980 kept the Blue Devils in the thick of the ACC race and reinforced just how far Duke has come.
With North Carolina finally grinding out Bill Belichick’s first ACC win at Syracuse and Dave Doeren posting one of the biggest wins of his career over Georgia Tech in what may very well be his final season at N.C. State, it’s a good moment to take stock of how reliable Duke has become, year after year, while those two other programs swing between extremes.
There is a lot of credit to go around, from two athletic directors — Kevin White and Nina King — who made smart hires, to boosters who have stepped to the plate and funded the program at a high level even while paying NBA wages for basketball stars like Cooper Flagg and Cameron Boozer, to a trio of coaches who each contributed in their own way.
Cutcliffe did the heavy lifting. He was hired in 2007 before even the lawsuit “victory” and did the impossible, turning a literal (and legal) laughingstock into an ACC contender and ending the bowl drought that dated back to Fred Goldsmith in the early 1990s. And even though things wavered at the end of his tenure, Duke learned a hard lesson: It had started to take Cutcliffe’s success for granted, and made the investments Elko needed to reboot things. Which he did. Instantly.
Diaz picked up where Elko left off and here Duke is now, one of five one-loss teams chasing Virginia in the ACC, with Virginia and three other very winnable games still to play, very much in the Charlotte conversation if not otherwise in CFP contention thanks to the losses to Illinois, Tulane and Georgia Tech.
Similar programs that made similar ascents — Northwestern and Stanford to name two — have struggled to remain at that level. Duke has not only managed to maintain, but is now notable for its consistency, something neither of the other Triangle programs can say.
This isn’t shocking anymore. It has become expected. No one is surprised when Duke is good at football. But maybe they should be.
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