The second half of Tech’s regular season begins with a road trip to Durham to face everyone’s (least) favorite New Jersey trust fund babies.
In some ways I feel for David Cutcliffe. He spent well over a decade dragging Duke football from deep in the mud up to honorable mediocrity and then to genuine ACC contention before things went backwards at the end of his tenure. It was a genuinely amazing achievement at a place where winning a couple games was exceeding expectations when he arrived.
But just…
what was the point? Duke can lay claim to a current starting NFL quarterback thanks to Daniel Jones’ renaissance with Indianapolis, which only about 30 schools can say at any given time. But even if Jones manages to resurrect his NFL career and become one of the best in the league, he’ll never be as beloved in Durham or Jersey as Brian Zoubek*. And that really says it all.
* I needed a random forgettable Duke basketball player to make this joke, and my mind naturally went to the guy whom my buddy Hari and I used to needle with chants of THE BEARD IS WEIRD BRIAN and MOUNTAIN MAN. How weird was the beard in reality? Judge for yourself.
Duke remains firmly in ACC contention at this stage, as both of their losses were to non-conference opponents in Illinois (which definitely didn’t lose a game 63-10 this year) and Tulane (whose quarterback they definitely didn’t poach in the offseason). They haven’t beaten anyone of consequence yet and still have two games left against ranked ACC teams. We know this is a fun ACC season because neither of those two teams are the preseason league favorite (Dabo Swinney’s Clemson) or the self-proclaimed 33rd NFL team (Jordon Hudson’s UNC).
Still, they’re 4-2 midway through the season and coming off a bye. And hey, whatever happens this weekend, at least they dodge the invincible Death Star that is this year’s Miami team with the coach who pushed out Manny Diaz still running the show and Carson Beck at quarte—hold on, I’m getting some breaking news about that…
Saturday could, of course, go very sideways for Tech. It might even be the likely outcome if Vegas is to be believed, and honestly it wasn’t all that long ago that Duke went 5-1 against Tech from 2014-2019. But the good guys prevailed last year, and if it happens again, Duke fans will be as disappointed as they were when they got rejected from Yale and Princeton.
