Duke football comes from behind to take down Wake Forest
Duke wins it 24-21 on Pelino field-goal.
Don’t know where, don’t know when. But somewhere, sometime next month, Duke football will be playing in a bowl game.
Duke’s 24-21 win over Wake Forest wasn’t easy and it sure wasn’t pretty. But it’s a binary sport, you win or you lose.
And Duke won, to go 6-3. All those day-to-day injuries became playing-some-other-day injuries. A third-string quarterback, a patched up offensive line, some dropped passes, some truly bad penalties and somehow Duke pulled it out when Todd Pelino drilled a 26-yard field goal as time expired to give Duke its only lead of the game at the time when it most mattered.
And truth be told, Wake also managed to shoot itself in the proverbial foot, two missed field-goals by Matthew Dennis, one partially blocked. And some crucial Deacon penalties, a pass interference and a roughing keying Duke’s winning drive.
Duke trailed 7-0, 14-7 and 21-14 but kept finding a way to stay in the game and then pull it out.
Grayson Loftis got the start at quarterback, a true freshman with no real experience in a college game whose outcome was still undecided.
And it went sideways in a hurry for Loftis. Wake took a 7-0 lead on their second possession, marching 76 yards in eight plays. Loftis fumbled on Duke’s second possession, Wake recovering at the Duke 15. But Duke’s defense held tough--not for the last time--and forced a 27-yard field goal, partially blocked by Chandler Rivers.
Still trailing 7-0 Duke got the equalizer on the ground. Jaquez Moore jump-started Duke’s offense with a 25-yard run and then a 32-yard TD run at the beginning of the second period.
Duke then got some momentum stopping the Deacs on fourth and one at the Duke 25. But Loftis was hit on Duke’s next play, Wake got the interception and the Deacs scored four plays later to go up 14-7.
It would have been easy for Loftis to unravel about this time.
Did not happen.
“Just trusted my preparation,” Loftis said, “just trusting my guys. Our mindset on the sideline never wavered, We knew it was going to be a fourth-quarter game. We knew there were going to be ups and downs. DeWayne [Carter] talked about response. It was always going to be how we responded.”
Duke tied it right before halftime, going 75 yards on 14 plays, bleeding 7:10 off the clock and giving a tired defense a chance to catch its breath.
Mike Elko’s thoughts?
“The drive right before halftime where we were able to go down and score the touchdown and tie it up and eat a lot of clock, I thought was huge, just for the whole flow of the game. I thought it gave the defense a break. I thought it got us to halftime with some momentum and some energy.”
Jordan Waters did much of the work, fighting into the end zone from four yards out. But Loftis started settling in, a 13-yard completion to Jaquez Moore picking up one first down, a five-yard scramble on third down picking up another.
Duke fell behind again. Dennis missed a 39-yard field goal on their first second-half possession but Wake took a 21-14 lead late in the third with an 80-yard drive, 61 of that coming on a pass from Mitch Griffis to Taylor Morin.
Griffis ended up completing 16 of 19 for 241 yards.
But the visitors wouldn’t score again.
“I thought we battled,” Elko said of his defense. “We kind of felt like Mitch was getting into rhythm the little bit he played last week [against Florida State]. That offense is a tough offense to go against. It’s different, takes a lot of different looks and reads. I thought at 7-0, going out there and making a stand as early as it was, I thought that was a critical sequence to hold them to a field goal, that they ultimately missed. And then we were able to pin them down in the fourth quarter.”
Carter said “it wasn’t pretty but we got it done. One play at a time. That was our mindset.”
Wake’s last four possessions went lost fumble, punt, punt and interception.
Duke got the equalizer when Loftis hit Jordan Moore for 29 yards, ending a drive kept alive by a 15-yard unsportsmanlike penalty.
What did Loftis see on that pass?
“Kind of a play we had been talking about running. Perfect call by Coach Johns and Coach Elko. We got the look we wanted, I was able to hang in the pocket, the offensive line protected it great, Jordan caught it and we hit it for a touchdown.”
Carter deflected a pass that Ryan Smith picked off to give Duke the ball at their 37, with 4:12 left. A holding penalty nullified a 21-yard Waters run and pushed Duke into a first-and-20 situation.
But a pass interference call kept the drive alive, an unnecessary roughness penalty put Duke into field-goal range, Duke ran the clock down and Pelino hit the game-winner.
“There’s not a lot of gray-area in that one,” Elko said. “You either handle it right or you don’t. It went through the uprights so I thought he handled it amazing.”
Elko said the win should “finally put to bed all the talk about whether this team will respond and whether this team will keep fighting and whether this team will represent Duke the right way. These kids just lay it all on the line every single week for this program and this university.”
Thanks for the detailed posting, Jim. You pick up and clarify essentially everything I wondered about during the game. You’re a treasure to Duke fans. I used to have a silly superstition that I didn’t believe what I saw really happened until I saw it in the newspaper. Now, I genuinely don’t feel I understand what happened until Jim Sumner analyzes and illuminates it.
It was so ugly I had flashbacks to some of Duke’s worst games ever, yet we won. That never happened in those flashback games. Like many at DBR I was cursing the coaches for trying to throw the ball early in the game rather than running it down Wake’s throat. Yet, maybe those terrible plays early helped Loftis gain some confidence. I can’t imagine us beating UNC, but historically some of those games have been weird. Maybe Loftis will kneel down to tie his shoelaces while Waters gets the ball and scores from way out.