Despite an excellent start to the season for the Blue Devils, a cloud of doubt still lingers over Duke’s football team. A similar 4-0 record at the beginning of the 2017 campaign was followed a six-game losing streak, a trend Duke hopes it won’t repeat.
Against a much-less talented N.C. Central team though, the Blue Devils made blatant mistakes that could keep them from improving their play from last year.
As expected, Duke put on a dominant display with explosive plays galore. However, it was the Blue Devil errors that proved to be the most eye-opening after Saturday’s matchup. The first half shouldn’t have been as close as it was, as Duke entered the locker room only up by 14 points after allowing for two N.C. Central touchdowns, the most the Eagles have scored against Duke in the last three years. Both scores were caused by unforced errors made by Duke on both sides of the ball.
On the Eagles’ second drive of the game, Duke’s defense forced a fourth down, leading to N.C. Central opting to punt the ball back to the Blue Devils. During the punt, redshirt freshman Chris Rumph II was penalized for jumping over the punt shield, resulting in a first down for the Eagles, and another opportunity for N.C. Central to score in Duke territory. The Eagles capitalized with a 20-yard rush from running back Isaiah Totten for their first touchdown of the day.
For a team that does not get penalized often—the Blue Devils went without a flag last week at Baylor—Duke’s discipline was not at as high of a level as usual. The Blue Devils committed nine penalties on the day.
“I think it’s a lack of not coming in as ready as you should. I take that responsibility as a head coach,” head coach David Cutcliffe said. “We’re better than that. We’ll respond to this and be better at it immediately.”
Later in the second quarter, on a Duke offensive drive, a cadence issue caused redshirt junior Quentin Harris to fumble the ball in the pocket. Eagle defensive back Jordan McCrae recovered the fumble for a 55-yard touchdown, N.C. Central’s second and final score of the day.
While these two instances were the mistakes most costly to the Blue Devils, they were far from the only ones. A couple of inaccurate passes from Harris, who ended the game connecting on 15 of his 27 passes, stagnated the offense near the end of the first half which resulted in only one more touchdown from Duke. Cutcliffe’s squad entered the locker room up by 14 to a team that has not come within 30 points against the Blue Devils in the past three years alone.
Duke looked more focus in the second half, shutting down any more scoring drives from the Eagles and adding 28 points of its own to bring the final ledger to 55-13.
“We made a lot of mistakes and they took advantage of them, and that’s something we can’t do,” redshirt senior Johnathan Lloyd said. “[Cutcliffe] was direct. He just demanded that we step it up, and the second half was a lot better.”
But one good half is not enough to compete against the best in the nation, and Duke needs to find a way to consistently string together two good halves.
Against the Bears, the Blue Devils took a shutout into the locker room. But errors in the secondary allowed Baylor to make it a competitive game in the second half. Duke saw a similar performance a week before against Northwestern as the Blue Devils scored three touchdowns in the first half, but went scoreless for the rest of the game. Consistency throughout the game and more focus will be very important for the Blue Devils going forward. A half without production will give any team the chance to put up big numbers against Duke.
“You can’t let go of the gas anytime in the game. You signed up for 60 minutes,” redshirt junior Joe Giles-Harris said. “NCCU played a great game and hats off to them, but you’re not going to win ACC games playing 30 minutes.”
Because of N.C. Central’s inability to match Duke in talent, speed and strength, it proved somewhat easy for the Blue Devils to bounce back in the second half to further increase their lead and put the Eagles away. However, as Duke enters its ACC gauntlet next week against Virginia Tech, it will have to eliminate those momentum-changing errors if it wants any chance of having a better mid-season record than last year.
In a close game against a talented team, a personal foul or a scoop-and-score could be the difference between an inched-out victory and a soul-crushing loss.
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