CLEMSON, S.C. -- Nine minutes into Duke's 40-7 bloodletting at the hands of a motivated Clemson team, neither squad had an advantage.
The Blue Devils were holding their own against the Tigers in Death Valley, having engineered a promising, if ultimately ineffective drive, and head coach Ted Roof's unit was reining in the Clemson offense with some success. Each team had furious momentum, with the hosts having won their first "Bowden Bowl" against Florida State the week previous; Duke had won its first "Beat an ACC Opponent Bowl" since 1999. The score was 0-0.
Ten minutes into the contest, Death Valley was energized, Clemson was cruising, and the Duke squad was playing like it had during the most discouraging moments of the Carl Franks era. The score was 14-0, Clemson.
A reporter sitting ahead of me in the Memorial Stadium Press box summed it up pretty well: "It's easy to forget," he said. "But Duke is still Duke."
The battle of momentum in Saturday's rout was the key element. The Blue Devils had logged strong losing efforts against superior opponents in each of Roof's first two games, and followed it up with what had once seemed impossible, a win over an ACC team. Following Duke's relentless drubbing of Georgia Tech, the Blue Devils were trying to establish a winning streak, something unthinkable the week before, against Tommy Bowden's bowl-eligible squad.
"I felt the excitement and the enthusiasm on the sideline before the game," Roof said.
If there was one ACC team with more inertia than the Blue Devils going into this weekend, it was Clemson. Bowden had beaten his father, Florida State legend Bobby Bowden, for the first time the week before, giving the Tigers a winning record in the conference and perhaps saving the younger Bowden's job. After knocking off FSU, Bowden was now confronted with the less daunting goal of beating Duke.
"It was a challenge for the team to do that," Bowden said. "It's also helpful to come against an opponent that hasn't had a good record."
But in the middle of the first half, the game took on a decidedly orange tone. Charlie Whitehurst marched the Tigers 49 yards, 34 of which were in the air, to the Duke 31-yard line on Clemson's first possession. The sophomore quarterback then threw a strike to wideout Derrick Hamilton as the junior streaked through the endzone. Clemson took a seven-point lead, but the Duke faithful had little to worry about. The Duke offense had looked competent at points during the first drive of the game, and was set to take the field after the kickoff.
The Duke offense didn't get its chance after the kickoff.
Clemson kickoff specialist Jad Dean boomed a kick into the hands of returner Senterrio Landrum, who raced 25 yards up the left side of the field before being leveled and stripped of the ball by a vicious Steven Jackson hit. Buddy Williams fell on the ball, and Whitehurst's offense retook the field. On the first play from scrimmage, Whitehurst hit Hamilton again for a 25-yard tally. The drive had lasted all of seven seconds.
On the ensuing drive, Schneider deprived Reggie Love of a 15-yard reception with a leaping interception. Clemson had the ball again, 20 seconds and 14 points after its first score.
The wind seemed removed from Duke's sails, and the Blue Devils looked like the becalmed ACC basement crew that Roof and others had hoped was a thing of the past.
The Blue Devils put together a few impressive plays in the remainder of the first half, most notably the defensive backs. John Talley had an interception in the endzone at the half's end, and Alex Green and Brian Greene both used acrobatic play to break up Whitehurst's passing game. But these bright spots for Duke were the exceptions and not the rule.
Clemson continued to walk, run, dance and hop all over the Blue Devils, limiting halfback and primary offensive weapon Chris Douglas to 23 yards in the first half. The entire Blue Devil offense managed to earn a scanty 49 yards. By halftime, the score was 24-0, and whatever momentum beating up on the Ramblin' Wreck had endowed Duke with was gone.
"We by no means thought it would be an easy game," Douglas said after the game. "But we definitely thought we'd execute better than we did."
Roof knew that his team had lost the battle of momentum, but he knows it wasn't momentum that beat Duke. It was Clemson.
"Confidence is a very powerful thing," he said "I thought we were confident coming into the game; then we had some bad things happen early that we didn't respond to as well as we should have. "We might have lost a little confidence, but Clemson certainly had something to do with that."
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