Next Man Up. One of my favorite sports cliches. Not as much as giving 110 percent but it’s a keeper.
And yes, Next Woman Up is a thing.
Next (wo)man up applies to every team sport but it seems most applicable to football, perhaps because it’s most often needed in that most violent of team sports.
Which brings me to Ron Sally. He was a Duke quarterback in the early 1980s. A St. Louis native, Sally came to Duke in the same class as Ben Bennett.
Bennett may have been the highest-profile recruit of the freshman-eligible era. Maybe Mike Dunn, maybe Vince Oghobaase, maybe Scott Bracey belong in the discussion. But Bennett was brash, cocky, outspoken, well, you get the drift.
And he could back it up. In 1982 he became the first ACC player to pass for 3,000 yards in a season. He broke that mark the following season. After years of Mike McGee’s conservative offense, of Dunn and Stanley Driskell and Brent Clinkscale handing the ball off, Bennett was a breath of fresh air when Duke football desperately needed a breath of fresh air.
Which didn’t leave much for Sally to do. He threw two passes in 1980, both incomplete, one intercepted. He spent much of his college career on the sidelines giving signals to the guy on the field.
But not all of it.
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