For the better part of a decade, no matter how bad things got, no matter how many conference losses piled up, there were always two kind words on the football team's schedule: Wake Forest.
Apparently, nothing is sacred these days.
One win away from clinching their first winning season and possibly their first bowl berth since 1992, the Demon Deacons (5-4, 2-4 ACC) are no longer the conference's stepchild.
And the Blue Devils (2-7, 2-4) must be wondering what happened to the team they victimized 19-16 a year ago to snap a record 21-game losing streak in ACC play. Wake Forest, which boasts the ACC's second-best defense, held a sputtering North Carolina squad to just three points last week.
"Our challenge this week is a Wake Forest team that's probably the most improved team in our league," said coach Carl Franks, whose Blue Devils host Wake Forest Saturday at 1:30 p.m. "I don't know if Wake Forest is too concerned about Duke right now."
Maybe the Deacons should be. Duke is 32-76-1 since 1990, but the Blue Devils have more victories in that span against Wake (five) than against any other ACC foe.
"At the beginning of the year, going into a game like this, I would have felt pretty good," Franks said, "because I felt we could stop the run."
Franks' feeling was wrong. The Blue Devils have allowed nearly 200 rushing yards per game, the second-worst total in the conference. Only
"We haven't played very well defensively for a whole game in a while," Franks said. Or, to put it more bluntly, "We're a poor tackling football team."
Of course, that doesn't bode well against a Wake Forest squad that runs the ball on nearly three out of every four plays. Workhorse tailback Morgan Kane has already carried the ball 229 times-more than Duke's top three backs combined.
The smashmouth attack is quite a departure from the chuck-and-duck days that saw quarterbacks Rusty LaRue and Brian Kuklick rewrite the school's record books. Although coach Jim Caldwell has vowed to stress the running game nearly every year since his arrival, this is the first year the Deacons have been successful with a run-first mentality.
"They're real physical," Duke linebacker Ryan Stallmeyer said. "They're going to try to smashmouth us. It's going to be a fight. If we're not prepared to fight, they're going to roll over us."
Duke's problems on defense have been poor executions, not faulty gameplans, said Stallmeyer, who leads the Blue Devils with 93 tackles.
"We're just not coming up ready to tackle," Stallmeyer said. "It's just poor technique and things like that."
Stallmeyer, one of 21 seniors playing his final game at Wallace Wade Stadium, doesn't think there's anything hokey or trite in the "playing for pride" chatter heard around the practice fields
In a season that has fallen well short of expectations, a win Saturday would give Stallmeyer and his fellow seniors a shot at their first .500 record in conference play.
Still, it's probably not what the fifth-year senior had in mind when he signed on to a team that went 8-4 in 1994.
"We haven't accomplished a lot of what we set out to do," Stallmeyer said. "There's been more than a few nights I've stayed up thinking about it."
Stallmeyer might sleep better if Duke can manage more than the 202 yards total offense the Blue Devils piled up last week in a 58-7 debacle at Clemson. Duke will have to cope, however, with the loss of wideout Ben Erdeljac, lost for the season with torn knee ligaments.
Franks is also concerned about depth on defense, where an already-thin squad has to cope with the loss of defensive back Josh Kreider (high ankle sprain) and starting free safety Eric Jones (pinched nerve).
"We've had some spurts on both sides of the ball, but we've had problems maintaining that," Franks said. "Maybe we're not playing enough guys on defense. We've got to develop some depth both offensively and defensively to give our guys a rest."
Note: Saturday is Duke's annual Youth Day ceremony, featuring guest speaker Dan Cathy, Chick-Fil-A president and son of the company's founder. Music for the event, which begins at 11:30 a.m., will be provided by Brothers Keepers.
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