Head coach David Cutcliffe has a simple saying that he applies to all facets of his Duke squad: "If you don't like what you're getting, change what you are doing."
And no one would argue that the Blue Devils did not like what they were getting from their kicking game last season.
Three Duke placekickers combined to make 3-of-11 field-goal attempts, and two of those misses came in critical fourth quarters. But out of the ashes of the failures of last year, senior Joe Surgan and sophomore Nick Maggio have risen and booted 6-of-7 attempts through the uprights, including 46- and 52-yarders in the game against Navy Sept. 13.
Surgan and Maggio were the kickers most responsible for the previous kicking woes, but now, they have established themselves as reliable placekickers.
What happened? Not surprisingly, their success was triggered by Cutcliffe's guiding mantra.
"The [entire] program had to make a change," Surgan said. "They are trying to start over, so we felt we should do the same thing as a unit. We spoke about it in the offseason, and we needed to kind of reevaluate everything that we do and the way we operate day-in and day-out.
"We have made a lot of changes. We are much more fundamentally sound, and we are much more focused on the fundamentals. We are really focused on doing the same thing every day and having a routine."
And that routine stems from a stringent practice regimen.
Every day, Cutcliffe goes above and beyond the normal motivating factors to make sure that kicking in practice is actually harder than kicking in the game.
"I'm just as much pressure as what is out there [in a game], I promise you," Cutcliffe said Sept. 23 to a group of chuckling reporters. "I promise you. Ask them. At least I'm not right out there behind them in a game, and they can choose to go off on the other sideline. At practice, I'm right there. We try to create, in all seriousness, what we do in practice. It can be lip service but it's not going to be here. We make practice like a game. We try to make it actually more intense."
Maggio agreed that the differences in staring at an opponent's defense and hearing Cutcliffe in his ear are minimal.
"It's very comparable," Maggio said. "With Coach Cut breathing down my neck, it gives kind of a game-like atmosphere which I like, because it gets me prepared for the games. So if I do everything in practice right, games should be the same thing."
Surgan, however, approaches his kicks differently. Instead of bringing the game to practice, he tries to bring practice to the game.
"When I'm out on the game field, I'm trying to bring the feeling of being in practice in because that's where I'm spending most of my time," Surgan said. "And having Coach Cutcliffe standing right behind you yelling in your ear, you know, once you're out there in front of everyone else, it can't get much harder than that."
Neither Cutcliffe nor special teams coach Zac Roper was forced to reinvent the way Surgan or Maggio kicked. They both saw that the basic techniques were there. They simply changed the two kickers' mind-sets.
"They came in, and the first thing they preached to us was discipline and really being focused on everything you're doing all the time, both on and off the field," Surgan said of the new staff. "And we have brought that same mind-set out here as a unit.... We've brought that mind-set everyday to do the same thing, which is what you have to do out on the field. It's routine. You have to able to do it over and over again."
And for Surgan and Maggio this year, that means repeating the process of making kicks, not missing them.
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