Inept offense fails to score TD for 2nd straight week

Two games and more than 120 minutes into Duke's season, the question Carl Franks never dreamed he'd ever have to answer just jolted him like a raging free safety.

"When is Duke going to finally score a touchdown?"

It was never supposed to be like this. Franks had brought his Florida-style offense to inject some much-needed life into an attack that had stalled under former head coach Fred Goldsmith. But instead of a Blue Devil offensive explosion, Franks' brainchild has imploded in a horrific eight-quarter, zero-touchdown display.

"If you had told me we'd go eight quarters and not score a touchdown, I would have said there was no way it could happen," Franks said, still shaking his head and wondering how this could have ever happened.

Granted, the offense fared better in this game than in its debut, when it never managed to cross ECU's 10-yard line. Saturday, the Blue Devils twice marched inside the Northwestern five-yard line, but failed to cash in either time. And if one official had ruled Scottie Montgomery's apparent grab in the endzone a catch, the Blue Devils may well have celebrated their first touchdown of the season.

But even taking all that into consideration, Duke's offense was, in a word, offensive.

The measures of futility were simply staggering.

• The first pass completion of the day came with 7:27 left in the second quarter.

• Before that play, Duke had run up six yards of total offense on 27 plays.

• Kevin Thompson hit only 12-of-32 passes on the day, and was, by far, the better quarterback on the afternoon, as starter Bobby Campbell completed 2-of-14 for 12 yards.

• Franks never gave up on the ground game, but B.J. Hill and Duane Epperson combined for only 74 yards on 28 carries, a paltry 2.6 yards per carry.

• Duke's two best offensive players, Richmond Flowers and Montgomery, caught a combined three balls for 18 yards.

And when the offense had the opportunity to strike gold, it found coal. Just before the half, Thompson had driven the team down to the Northwestern 25 with under a minute left. But on the third-and-five, Thompson and the rest of the offense looked confused before the play, and looked ever worse during it. Defensive end Gladston Taylor swarmed Thompson back at the 35-yard line, pushing the Blue Devils into questionable field goal range.

"We tried to audible on that play and not everybody got the audible," Franks said. "I wish we had communicated the audible to everybody because we got to a good play-we just didn't get it to everybody."

The protection scheme broke down again at another crucial juncture later in the game. An Eric Jones pick had handed the Blue Devils a golden opportunity on the Northwestern 41-yard line with 47 seconds left. But Dwayne Missouri and Kevin Bentley combined to drop Thompson back in Duke territory on first down and effectively ended Duke's chances in regulation.The backwards march at the end of regulation and Montgomery's near-grab in overtime put the exclamation point on an afternoon of frustrations for the offense.

Whether it was the quarterback shuffle that resulted in little production from one and even less from the other, or the ineffective ground game or the string of open receivers missed and not seen, one thing was made painfully clear: while the offensive game plan might be a work of genius, the execution is still a work in progress.

"I think our [offense] is very young and we don't know each other yet," Montgomery said. "I wish that I could tell you the truth and say, 'We're going to be clicking next week.' I think we got better, but we really have to come together as a team and play team football.

"It just kills me to see [Franks] go through this. Because he's putting together one of the best game plans I've ever been around, and we're just not executing as an offense-just not executing."