There are few things in this world I hate more than being wrong, except for maybe Jay Mariotti, which is why writing this particular column pains me.
Before continuing, it should be noted that I am extremely stubborn, a White Sox fan and have an IQ above 65-and although some may argue that these last two conditions are contradictory, I contend all three qualities inform my first statement.
It is in this light that I offer my first mea culpa of the year: I was wrong in my Oct. 7 column criticizing Duke after a lopsided 27-0 loss at Georgia Tech.
And I owe apologies to several people, including, but not limited to: David Cutcliffe, my dad (whom I hung up on in anger after he disdainfully told me my column was "Mariotti-esque") and you, the reader, to whom I did not give the best analysis possible.
I thought I could use a few numbers and a T.S. Eliot allusion to eloquently make a more dramatic point-and I did-but I now believe it was the wrong one.
My basic premises then were that Cutcliffe had heightened expectations for his team and failed miserably in meeting them against the Yellow Jackets, that the new Blue Devils looked strikingly similar to the Blue Devils of old and that, ultimately, when the offense sputtered so terribly as it did that Saturday, it was bad for morale and recruiting because without Cutcliffe's promised points, the energy of his new regime could fall by the wayside.
"Through the first four contests, Cutcliffe delivered [on his guarantee of more exciting offense]," I wrote two weeks ago. "But, then again, the 2007 Blue Devils put up 20 against Northwestern and 43 against Navy in their opening weeks (almost identical to this team's 20- and 41-point outputs). Saturday's contest against a good but not great Georgia Tech team makes me wonder how realistic that promise could be right from the get-go."
At its most basic level, I suppose this analysis is true. But what made it "Mariotti-esque," i.e. unfair, was my failure to qualify why those promises of energetic offense and conference wins were unrealistic in the first place. And as I sat in Wallace Wade Stadium Saturday afternoon and watched Duke turn a 10-point first-half lead into an 18-point final deficit against Miami, I knew I had to take this opportunity to right my wrongs, to discuss what is really true about the current state of Duke Football and what is actually needed to bring about that much-ballyhooed Dawn of a New Day.
Sometime in the second quarter, when the Blue Devils still had the lead and the Hurricanes looked more like a light sun shower, a group of friends moved their way down the bleachers to where my friends and I were sitting.
As the two teams lined up almost directly in our sight line, one of the friends turned around to the rest of his posse.
"Man, those are some really big guys," he said, referring to the Miami defensive line.
"Yeah, well, we've got a left guard?" said one of his friends behind him, a former Duke football player.
Therein lies the truth about Duke Football and its future: Even a subpar Miami team was going to have the size and the speed at the line to overcome the Blue Devils.
It didn't matter whether Duke went into halftime Saturday with a three-point lead or a 10-point one. The line of scrimmage is what separates Duke from your run-of-the-mill ACC foe, from the Blue Devils of old and the Cutcliffe-promised Blue Devils of the future.
Thaddeus Lewis is an above-average quarterback-and I mean that in the most complimentary way possible. But you still have to wonder what his game would be like if he had more time to make decisions. You also have to wonder if one of Cutcliffe's famed quarterback protégés could have done that much better against Miami behind the Blue Devil line.
Sure, Eron Riley dropped a bunch of passes Saturday he probably would have caught if he were healthy. And sure, there were some devastating missed opportunities, such as Duke's defensive series early in the third quarter when Ayanga Okpokowuruk nearly took down Miami quarterback Jacory Harris for a safety on first down and Michael Tauiliili dropped an interception at the 5-yard line on second down that would have built the Blue Devil lead to 10.
But in the end, the game was never going to be in question.
"We knew it was going to be difficult," Cutcliffe said after the game Saturday. "We knew we had to play much more physical on the lines of scrimmage [to win]."
Two weeks ago, I said that putting up at least one score per game wasn't just "reasonable. It's critical."
What I should have said was: Building the Duke lines-and quickly-is critical.
Because in the end, you can have all of the four- and five-star position players you want, but if you don't have the lines to protect them, to open up the field for them, then not even the most convincing of halftime performances will hold.
Sorry.
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