CHAPEL HILL -- 14 times a charm.
After falling to North Carolina in each game against its archrival for the past 13 years, the football team defeated the Tar Heels 30-22 behind 119 rushing yards and a touchdown from senior tailback Chris Douglas. The win gave Duke its second ACC win of the year, moving the Blue Devils into eighth place in the conference, the first time the team did not finish last in the league since 1999.
The win improved interim head coach Ted Roof's career record to 2-3. The man Roof replaced, Carl Franks, had a 7-45 record in his tenure at Duke.
"Not to say anything that was wrong with Coach Franks, we needed some kind of change, whether it was a wakeup call or whatever," senior linebacker Ryan Fowler said.
After punting on their first possession of the game, the intense Blue Devils scored on their next five offensive possessions, making the score 23-0 at halftime. Duke's defense played as well as it had all season, allowing only two first downs in the opening half against a team that came into the game averaging an impressive 26.8 points per game. The score could have been much worse for the Tar Heels, as the North Carolina defense forced Duke into settling for two field goals inside of UNC's ten yard line, and Phillip Alexander dropped a "gimme" interception with a clear route to the endzone.
North Carolina came out firing in the second half, however, crunching the Blue Devils' lead to 23-15 with 14:55 remaining in the fourth quarter. Darian Durant completed a 17-yard pass to Wallace Wright for the first score, and Durant darted for 10-yards on a quarterback keeper for the second. The UNC quarterback completed a pass to Brandon Russell for a two-point conversion to put points fourteen and fifteen on the board.
"We came out flat in the third quarter," Douglas said. "We almost relented momentum, and we tried to get it back in the fourth quarter."
The resilient Blue Devils, however, quickly countered. Led by a thirty-yard bootleg pass from quarterback Chris Dapolito to tight end Andy Roland, a fifteen-yard pass interference penalty on the Tar Heels, another 22-yard Dapolito-Roland connection, and a one-yard Douglas touchdown run, the score was 30-15 just 2:23 later.
North Carolina once again made things interesting after a 31-yard Durant pass found Jacque Lewis in the endzone made the score 30-22 Blue Devils with 5:35 remaining in the game.
The Tar Heels forced Duke to punt on its next possession, but not before North Carolina used all three of its timeouts and Duke shaved nearly three minutes off the clock.
After Durant completed a seven-yard strike to Russell to start a possible game-tying drive, the Blue Devils stopped the Tar Heels on three consecutive plays--highlighted by cornerback Kenneth Stanford's near-interception on second down, and Matt Zielinski's game-ending sack on fourth.
Despite the win, there was no clear indication that Duke will re-hire Roof to coach next season, though Duke athletic director Joe Alleva did say that Roof was a strong candidate for the job.
It is obvious who the players want to lead future Duke teams.
"We wanted to give Coach Roof a fair shot at the job next year," Fowler said. "He's done so much for this team since he took over...give him some more time and he'll do more and more."
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