With a losing season guaranteed after last Saturday's 41-38 loss to N.C. State, one might have expected football head coach Fred Goldsmith to be downtrodden or in bad spirits at his weekly press conference on Monday afternoon. But expectations have never stopped Goldsmith.
His Blue Devils face Wake Forest on Saturday in Wallace Wade Stadium in a matchup of the two worst teams record-wise in the Atlantic Coast Conference.
Duke (2-6, 0-5 in the ACC) had two goals entering the season. The first was to have a winning season, and the second was to be invited to a bowl game. Since both of those goals no longer attainable, the last three games have somewhat of a lesser importance--to everyone except the Duke football team.
"It'd sure make me and the seniors feel a whole lot better about the season to win these three games," Goldsmith said. "As I get ready for this game, basically, we'll approach it like we're playing for a bowl game. Football is a game that you have to approach it that way. If you don't approach it that way it becomes very dangerous to your players.
"There's so much work involved with football. Not just the week of the game, but throughout the course of the year. You don't just say, `Well, it's not a winning season. It's not very important.' There's too much work involved, and you're going to show up and play."
The Demon Deacons (1-7, 0-5 in the ACC) are the only team in the ACC with fewer wins than Duke. Many coaches might be tempted to use this game and the other two remaining to play younger players, who will still be with program next year. For Goldsmith, that is not an option he would even consider.
"I think you play your best players," Goldsmith said. "I think it's vastly overrated to say that you're getting someone experience--a few plays or quarters almost a full year before the next season. That really is not a whole lot of carryover, experience-wise. Your experience comes from working on technique day after day after day in practice."
Many of the Blue Devils have been hampered by injuries this season, however, and have been unable to do such work in practice on a regular basis. Goldsmith pointed out continuity as the one thing he regrets about this season. Whether it was players being held out of games or practices because of injury, the fact of the matter is that Duke has had little carryover from game-to-game on either side of the football, in terms of improvement.
While he has stuck by his seniors, Goldsmith has also picked up his efforts in recruiting high school players with each new loss. It is important for him to bring in another good recruiting class this year, and he has not been helped by Duke's performance on the field.
"If I do it and our coaches do it, we have such a great product to sell here at Duke," Goldsmith said. "Overcome the dejection with the defeat, and then get on the telephone and keep right on calling. That's how you see the programs built.
"The problem is a lot of times in recruiting, when you're losing, people feel sorry for themselves. It's the hardest thing to do when you've been losing, to set aside an hour and make those phone calls. But if you do it and work at it and work at it, you can sell Duke and you can still recruit well. And we'll recruit well this year."
Goldsmith knows simply picking up the phone is the hardest thing to do. Recruiting at Duke, he faces the difficulty of finding prospects who can qualify academically at Duke, where admission standards are much higher than other ACC schools.
"It's going along well," Goldsmith said. "We had some of our top recruits, several of which have already committed to us, at the game on Saturday, and they were all sounding positive. The thing about Duke is it's not just winning or losing--even though winning makes it easier.
"You can recruit so many good players from so vast an area. There are some schools where it's really hard to recruit unless you're winning big, but we have so much to offer."
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