Physicality is the buzzword this week

Will the Duke-Northwestern game be decided in the trenches?

Duke and Northwestern aren’t actually doppelgangers. The relative success of the respective men’s basketball programs sees to that.

But they’re pretty darn close. Both are academically-elite private schools that play football in Power-Five conferences dominated by large, state-supported public schools.

And neither school has been able to establish any long-term football dominance. Duke is 62-64 over the last decade, Northwestern 69-54. Duke is 10-25 over the last three seasons, Northwestern 13-20, not counting this season. Duke is 11-10 overall against Northwestern and has won the last three meetings, including a 30-23 win last season at home.

So, why is Northwestern a 10-point favorite going into Saturday’s match?

I can come up with several reasons. Northwestern is at home and that usually counts for something. Note than kickoff is around 11 A.M. local time, perhaps not an ideal time for local fans.

But the TV beast needs to be fed. Inventory is inventory.

Plus, Northwestern didn’t play last week and Duke did and extra rest always helps in football, even if you’ve only played one game.

And that one Northwestern game was in the unlikely locale of Dublin, Ireland, back in week zero, which explains the weekend off. Northwestern came from behind to win 31-28 and they may not have done that had Nebraska head coach Scott Frost not tried a spectacularly ill-advised onside kick just after his team took a 28-17 lead.

Now this isn’t the Nebraska that struck fear and loathing into the hearts of two generation of football fans. They haven’t had a winning season since 2016 and they were 3-9 last season. But one of those wins was 56-7 over Northwestern. So, I guess a 52-point turnaround by Northwestern should get one’s attention.

But there’s also a perception that Big Ten football is better than ACC football in part because Big Ten football is more physical; smash-mouth, man-to-man, slug it out.

Duke coach Mike Elko certainly didn’t do anything to dispel that narrative in his Monday press conference.

“I think they're an extremely physical football team, something you would expect that from a Big Ten team.”

“They have a lot of experience up front, and they are a big physical team,” two sentences later.

“They're a big physical front four,” later on.

Point made.

Physicality has been one of the buzz words at Duke ever since Elko took over at Duke.  And Duke certainly dominated both lines of scrimmage against Temple.

But Temple isn’t a Big Ten team.

And if Elko is emphasizing Northwestern’s physicality to the media, imagine what he’s telling his football team.

Ja’Mion Franklin is one of the Blue Devils who will be challenged to match and exceed that physicality. Franklin is a 311-pound, redshirt senior defensive tackle and he told the media that Elko’s words were definitely a challenge,

“We’re open for the challenge,” he told the media Tuesday. “We accept it. The first thing we did Monday, Coach [Jess] Simpson wrote on the board our point of emphasis this week is physicality. They’re an established group, an older group so me and Wayne [DeWayne Carter], the old guys, the bell cows on the defensive line, so we’re going to set the tone. We’re excited to face a veteran group.”

Franklin added that being physical is partly a mentality but it’s also about technique.

“Technique is really important. You can go out and have the right intent, you can have the right aggression but if you don’t have the right technique, it will only take you so far.”

Define technique.

“It’s something we preach every day. It’s on our board every morning before we get into the meeting, you can see it as a reminder that we need to have lower pad level, we need to have our hat, hands and feet going forward.”

But there’s more to Northwestern than physicality. Sure they ran for 214 yards against Nebraska, with Evan Hull accounting for 119 and Cam Porter 94.

But they also passed for an eye-opening 314 yards, with former South Carolina Gamecock Ryan Hilinski completing 27 for 38 passes, two touchdowns, no interceptions, no sacks.

And he used nine different receivers on those 27 completions.

In other words, Northwestern has a pretty balanced offense.

How does Duke counter that?

“They can do a lot of things,” Elko acknowledged, “so you've got to be able to be multiple in how you attack them. You've got to be able to take away the run at times without making yourself susceptible on the outside to the pass game. That'll be a little bit of the cat and mouse game is how do we make sure the running backs don't hurt us but also make sure we don't expose our secondary and put them into bad situations. Any time you see a team that's balanced, that obviously presents the biggest problems to you as a defensive coordinator because you have to be able to play that cat and mouse game.”

So, a physical cat and mouse game.

That should be fun.

It would help if Duke could put some pressure on Hilinski.

Elko and defensive coordinator Robb Smith have been consistent in their view that sacks don’t necessarily tell the whole story in that area.

“Sacks are obviously good and they're the end result of it all, but you could sack the quarterback twice and not impact them on 38 other plays and not help yourself win,” Elko said. “You can sack them zero times and impact them on 20 plays and win a football game.”

What constitutes impacting the quarterback?

“Hands in throwing windows . . .  reducing the pocket. Hopefully it leads to sacks, but it's really like we have a controlled mindset of how we're going to affect the quarterback and that's something to me that's really important.”

It’s also important to Franklin.

“It’s huge. The main thing Coach Elko talked about this morning is we’ve got to get pressure, we’ve got to make him uncomfortable. He’s been playing football a long time. He’s smart and he’s been in a lot of situations. He’s played a lot of football. If we get some knock-back on the line of scrimmage, it allows us to get some good rush. We’re just excited for the challenge. We know that if we get pressure on him, it will change the game completely.”

Of course Duke needs to score points. The first words out of wide receiver Jalon Calhoun’s mouth Tuesday were “the physicality has to go up, especially this week, going in to play a Big Ten team. At all positions, we have to be more physical.”

Any more would be belaboring the point. It’s going to be a physical football game for a Duke team that has tried very, very hard to redefine itself as the team that wins those physical battles. It’s not the only thing that’s going to decide Saturday’s game. But there’s a reason physicality is atop all of those bulletin boards.