Duke football enters week three confident but still learning

NC A&T awaits

If you’re looking for perfect, college football is the wrong place.

That’s a consistent message from Mike Elko, to his players, to the media and by extension to Duke’s fan base. You make mistakes, you learn from them and you try not to make them again.

“Whether you win or lose in the game of football,” Elko told the media Monday, “you put on a tape and you win and you expect everybody to be right and it never will be and there will be five or six plays that had they gone the other way would be the reason you lost. And when you lose a football game you expect to come in and see every play to be wrong and that’s not what happened either. That’s just understanding how football works. You’re always this close to the game going in the other direction.”

Duke won its last game, 31-23 over Northwestern. But some things went wrong, some missed tackles, some bad penalties, some bad reads.

It always does. That’s football.

But you have to learn from them before you leave them behind.

For one, Duke couldn’t build on that 16-minute, 21-0 explosion out of the gate.

Duke squandered some chances in the third period, a dropped pass in the end zone and a missed field goal costing Duke 10 points. But Duke didn’t even come close in the second period, after a touchdown in the opening seconds of the period.

“What we’ve got to do a better job of is--and we talked about this to the guys this morning--is continuing to be comfortable doing the ordinary things and not getting bored doing what’s working. When we hit that lull, there were a handful of plays where maybe we didn’t keep doing things at the level we had been doing them.”

And there were the penalties, a roughing-the-passer call on Shaka Heyward and several pass-interference calls.

Elko said the officials penalized Heyward for driving Northwestern quarterback into the ground instead of letting up.

The PI calls?

“We got too grabby at DB. We’ve got to figure out how to defend the football without grabbing. I think we still kind of panic at times when the football is in the air and we have to learn how to have poise through the finish.”

Immediately following the game Elko used the term “rainbow” to describe the gamut of Duke’s pass defense. On the one hand Duke broke up 14 passes. Safety Jaylen Stinson had 11 tackles and forced that last-second, goal-line fumble by Evan Hull that preserved the win; he was named the ACC’s defensive back of the week. Fellow safety Darius Joiner had 14 tackles. The third safety, Brandon Johnson recovered that big fumble and had two interceptions, one on a two-point conversion that won’t show up on the stat sheet but was the difference between a five-point Duke lead late and a three-point Duke lead.

So, how did Northwestern throw the ball for 435 yards?

Well, they did throw the ball 60 times. That’s what happens when you fall into an early three-touchdown hole.

But they also exploited some vulnerable areas in underneath coverage. Hull had 14 catches for 213 yards and a 39-yard touchdown on fourth down. A wide receiver with that stat line would go to the head of the line for the Biletnikoff Award. But he’s a running back. And tight end Thomas Gordon had 78 yards on five receptions.

Elko said the problem was both schematic and execution-based.

“That was something we’ve got to do a better job with, be a little bit more sound in our assignments and what we’re trying to do from an execution standpoint and we’ve got to do a better job as coaches getting us into better position to be successful.”

But the good parts much outweighed the not-so-good parts. Elko was especially pleased with a run defense that held Northwestern to barely two yards per carry.

Redshirt senior Ja’Mion Franklin came in for special praise. Elko recruited Franklin for Notre Dame--Franklin transferred to Duke after three seasons in South Bend--and says he always knew there was a good player there.

But Franklin has raised his game this season and Elko said there’s one key reason why. 

“He’s in a much better physical shape than he’s ever been in. He’s dropped 20 pounds from when we got here, he’s training at a really high level, he’s practicing really hard.”

On the other side of the equation Duke ran the ball with authority, further validating the off-season emphasis on getting stronger and tougher.

Elko said Duke’s offensive line took being underdogs personally.

“We made sure we reminded them of that a bunch. It’s no disrespect to anybody but we want to pride ourselves on being a physical football team. We practice hard. We want that to be something we can hang our hats on.”

If you can run the ball and keep the other team from running the ball, you’ve got a pretty good start on winning football games.

And if you think that final fumble was lucky, think again.

“I don’t think what happened in that game was luck. I think Jaylen Stinson played extremely hard to the end of that game and popped the ball out and obviously that won us a football game.

Which brings us to this week’s opponent, North Carolina A&T. In a season in which we’ve already seen Old Dominion beat Virginia Tech, Marshall beat Notre Dame and Georgia Southern beat Nebraska, well, never say never, I suppose.

And Elko did remind us that A&T took the opening kickoff last year and kept the ball for 20 plays in taking a 7-0 lead.

“A very fast, very athletic team, that’s going to really make it hard for you to run the football, they’re going to pack into the box. Offensively, they spread you out.”

A&T left the MEAC for the Big South but it’s still an FCS conference and Duke defeated A&T 45-17 last season and 45-13 in 2018.

Elko said his team is confident and that’s a confidence born from hard work.

“Confidence comes from preparation and confidence comes from how much you put into becoming the best you can become and these kids know they’ve worked.”

And there’s better coming down the road.

“We’re 2 and 0, we’re doing well and we’re playing at about 60 percent of our ability at this point. If we can continue to push there’s a chance we can do something special.”