Duke ends its worst season since 2007. Where do the Blue Devils go from here?
Fittingly for how the season had gone, Duke completed its pandemic-altered schedule with a blowout loss Saturday night.
The game included highlight-reel play after highlight-reel play for the opposition with a handful of Duke turnovers mixed in to help facilitate those big plays.
Florida State’s 56-35 win was appropriate when stacked together with the rest of Duke’s season-closing flop of a four-game losing streak. Duke lost 56-24 to North Carolina, 56-33 to Georgia Tech and 48-0 to Miami before getting knocked around by the Seminoles.
The Blue Devils’ 2-9 record is their worst in David Cutcliffe’s 13 seasons as coach. As those final four scores show, they were barely competitive in the season’s final month.
When Florida State needed six seconds more than 13 minutes of play to build a 28-0 lead Saturday, Cutcliffe had seen enough.
With his kick return unit on the field, he called the rest of the team together and verbally lit them up about their lackluster play.
“What are we doing?” Cutcliffe said of the speech during his postgame Zoom interview with reporters. “Focus on one play at a time to get back in this ballgame. We’re too good to look like we looked right there.”
Duke did that, scoring the game’s next three touchdowns to make a game of it.
Of course, mistakes, turnovers and injuries halted the comeback effort and allowed the Seminoles to pull away in the second half.
When Duke reached the FSU 18 in the final minute of the first half looking for the game-tying touchdown, holding penalties on three consecutive plays by three different players ruined that push.
Down seven points with the ball to start the second half, Duke lost the ball and their quarterback on the same play. Chase Brice was hit while attempting to run for a first down. He fumbled and suffered an upper-body injury that knocked him from the game for good.
Florida State scored a touchdown a few seconds later and that was that.
So Duke heads into the offseason with its program in a place it hasn’t been in nearly a decade. Cutcliffe and the Blue Devils suffered through back-to-back 3-9 seasons in 2010 and 2011 that included some lopsided ACC losses and a loss to an FCS team in Richmond.
The nature of the lopsided losses down the stretch this season brought to mind the years prior to Cutcliffe’s arrival, when Duke felt fortunate to simply win one game a season.
Are the Blue Devils really back to those days? Cutcliffe surely believes they aren’t. Running back Mataeo Durant, who capped a solid junior season by rushing for 127 yards on Saturday, sounded upbeat about what’s ahead for next season, as well.
“Even though things didn’t go the way we wanted,” Durant said, “I know we have a lot coming back. So I’m very excited for the next year we’re going to have.”
Duke has so many questions to find answers to as it enters another offseason that will continue to be impacted by the pandemic.
The Blue Devils, with Cutcliffe calling the plays on offense, turned the ball over 39 times in 11 games. That’s between three to four times per game on average. That’s a recipe for losses.
The offense’s failures exposed Duke’s defense, which allowed 38 points per game this season.
As those numbers show, Duke has a long way to go to get back to respectability next season.
“The focus is going to be on strength, conditioning, development,” Cutcliffe said. “Everything that we do, and we do well in our program, that’s got to be the focus.”
Duke has fallen fast from the stretch of seven bowl game appearances in an eight-year span. The Blue Devils hoped last year’s 5-7 season was a bump in the road. It turned out to be the start of a slump that now includes 16 losses in their past 23 games.
Most other coaches would be facing a pink slip after such a stretch, particularly in their 12th and 13th seasons. Evan as bad as the last month of games have been, Duke isn’t the kind of place that will jettison Cutcliffe.
He’ll get a chance to clean up this mess, and he has major work ahead before next season.
This story was originally published December 12, 2020 at 10:17 PM with the headline "Duke ends its worst season since 2007. Where do the Blue Devils go from here?."