There’s an old story that goes like this.
A group of senior professors in the English department is sitting in an office talking. The question arises: Who is the best teacher at Duke? The usual names come up in rapid succession: Frank Lentricchia, Stanley Fish, etc. Eventually, one of the distinguished faculty members pipes up. “You’re all wrong,” he says. “The best teacher at Duke is Mike Krzyzewski.”
The reply: “Hell, if I could choose all my students, I’d be the best teacher at Duke, too!”
Over the past 23 months, the answer to that question might have changed. For my money, the best teacher at Duke is David Cutcliffe—not because Coach K is slipping (he’s not: see last year’s 30-win season for details)—but because Cutcliffe is doing what he’s done without even picking his students.
Let’s recap: Since arriving as head football coach in December 2007, Cutcliffe has won nine games; in the five previous years that I had been at Duke, the football team won eight games. Since arriving as head football coach in December 2007, Cutcliffe has won four ACC games; in the five previous years that I had been at Duke, the football team won three ACC games. Cutcliffe’s record is 9-11; the previous five years’ record was 8-50.
And he’s done all this without his own players.
(This isn’t a dig at the players. Ex-coach Ted Roof brought in a lot of talent—maybe Cutcliffe would’ve chosen these players himself if he had the chance. But the fact is, he didn’t have the chance.)
The national discussion about Cutcliffe and Duke Football (what an awesome phrase to write) is that Cutcliffe deserves some consideration for ACC Coach of the Year. Please. Cutcliffe should be a shoo-in for ACC Coach of the Year and the odds-on favorite for National Coach of the Year.
I’d even put him up there as a contender for a Nobel Prize in Biology for bringing Blue Devil Football back from the dead. Maybe he deserves to win the Pulitzer Prize, because the rise of Duke Football is the best story of the year. I might even award him the first-ever Rick Reilly Cheesy Column Prize for providing this columnist with the opportunity to make two awful, corny jokes.
The fact of the matter is that what Cutcliffe has done in a season and a half has been nothing short of astounding. And whether the Blue Devils finish out the regular season with four wins and a trip to Tampa, or four losses and a trip home for Christmas, Cutcliffe’s second year at Duke will be an unqualified success.
Quite simply, no one does what Cutcliffe has done over the last year and a half. When he showed up, Duke Football wasn’t even a national joke; it was a national non-entity. Sometimes the Blue Devils were blown out; other times they snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. All of the things that have happened to Duke’s opponents over the course of this season—interceptions returned for touchdowns, fumbled punts recovered in the end zone, receivers running free through the secondary in the last three minutes of the game—used to happen to the Blue Devils. I know. I watched it happen.
Maybe it’s just the ball bouncing Duke’s way for a change—karmic payback from the Football Gods for all the years they spent smacking the Blue Devils in the mouth. But I’d like to think it’s a culture change.
Just listen to the players: “We know whatever situation we are in, we can come back,” quarterback Thaddeus Lewis said after the Virginia game last weekend. “We know what we are capable of.”
Contrast that to a representative quote from two years ago: “You come out here and you play hard, and your defense plays hard for four quarters, so to see the clock go to 0:00 and you are the winners is a great feeling.” That’s Lewis after Duke beat Northwestern early in the 2007 season, its only win of the year.
This year’s Lewis sure sounds more like a winner than 2007 Lewis.
And that’s the point. I’m not on the field, and I’m not in the players’ heads, but it seems to me that if you expect to win, you’ll play with more confidence. And confidence always makes things easier. Somehow, some way, despite 15 beyond-awful years, Cutcliffe convinced those kids to believe in themselves.
It took Moses 40 years in the desert to change the Israelites from slaves to free men. It only took Cutcliffe 23 months in Durham to change Duke Football from losers to winners. Perhaps less important, but no less difficult—after all, Moses got some help from plagues and all that.
Moses got the original copy of the Ten Commandments and a spot on the Mount Rushmore of biblical figures. At the very least, Cutcliffe deserves some end-of-season hardware.
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