The last domino falls from Duke's captain room.
On Thursday evening, redshirt senior defensive tackle DeWayne Carter — the team's only three-time captain — officially announced his declaration for the 2024 NFL Draft, bringing his lengthy and accolade-filled stay in Durham to a fitting close. Carter leaves Duke as one of its more successful defensive players in recent memory and leaves a sizable hole in the team's leadership after the departures of fellow captains Ja'Mion Franklin and Jacob Monk to the Draft and Riley Leonard to Notre Dame, respectively.
Carter truly saw it all. A three-star prospect out of Pickerington, Ohio, he came to Duke under the tutelage of former head coach David Cutcliffe, enduring a pair of seasons with five combined wins after his redshirt freshman year. He was then selected by former head coach Mike Elko as a team captain twice, helping transform the Blue Devil defense into one of the conference's and nation's more effective units. In particular, he led Duke to a No. 2 turnover margin in the country in 2022 and two consecutive years with bowl-game championships.
As for his personal accomplishments, Carter was named as a member of the All-ACC First Team, earned Duke's MVP and Defensive Player of the Year Award as well as the Jim Tatum Award, given annually by the ACC to the conference's top scholar-athlete. Across four years in blue, he totaled 87 tackles — 21.5 of which were for a loss — and 11 sacks.
Carter enters the 2024 NFL Draft as one of the ACC's better defensive linemen, joining Monk, Franklin, Anthony Nelson and Jalon Calhoun in their pursuits of the pros.
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Andrew Long is a Trinity junior and sports editor of The Chronicle's 119th volume.