CHAPEL HILL — For more than a month, Duke has had a virtually nonexistent running game, but it hadn’t mattered until Saturday.
In the Blue Devils’ biggest game in years, their one-dimensional offense finally caught up to them, and their three-game winning streak came to a screeching halt against North Carolina.
Duke rushed for 12 yards on 19 carries Saturday, but unlike the previous four contests, the passing attack—which entered Saturday as the seventh-best in the country—did not make up for that lack of production. After throwing for 383 yards per game in that span, quarterback Thaddeus Lewis had just 113 yards on 16-of-33 passing at Kenan Stadium.
The running game, which had averaged 1.4 yards per carry since Oct. 3, struggled even more than usual. Except for back-to-back Lewis scrambles in the third quarter which gained 33 combined yards, Duke was stopped within a few yards of the line of scrimmage on nearly every attempt.
“Against a team that relies so exclusively and heavily on the ability to throw the football, you always wanted it to stay a one-dimensional game,” North Carolina head coach Butch Davis said. “Our defense took the right approach, that we didn’t allow any kind of running game to get generated to start the ballgame. You don’t want to have to start cheating the box and devoting a whole lot of extra people to stopping the run.”
Because the Tar Heels did not have to stack the box to slow the Blue Devils’ running backs, they were able to focus on stopping the passing game. Lewis never seemed to find a rhythm. Even in the first half, when Duke stayed within a field goal of North Carolina, the offense sputtered to just six first downs and 82 total yards.
“Offensively, we struggled so much that we couldn’t protect the quarterback as well as we had hoped,” head coach David Cutcliffe said. “They got in and played tight man coverage for a large percentage of the time, and we didn’t separate very well or very quickly, so their rush got to Thad. Thad got hit way too much.”
The struggling offense didn’t just hurt the Blue Devils on the scoreboard, where they put up their lowest point total since Nov. 22, 2008. Combined with the Tar Heels’ powerful running game, it allowed North Carolina to dominate time of possession. The Tar Heels had the ball for 38:33 to Duke’s 21:27.
The Blue Devils’ bend-but-don’t-break defense held the Tar Heels to a pair of field goals before intermission, but it was only a matter of time before North Carolina broke through. With Duke wearing down in the second half, the Tar Heels scored 13 unanswered points to take over the contest.
In the fourth quarter, they capped a six-minute drive with a Jheranie Boyd touchdown to go up by 10 and all but put the game out of reach.
“I think [the offense was] fine,” Lewis said. “But with the defense out there on the field a long time, I’m pretty sure they get tired on those long drives.”
“In the fourth quarter, I really felt like they were getting fatigued because I was getting a lot of arm tackles,” said North Carolina running back Ryan Houston, who torched the Blue Devils for a career-high 164 yards. “I was running through all the tackles, and they weren’t pressing me as much as they were in the first quarter.”
As a result, Houston helped his team put together that long fourth-quarter drive to keep the Victory Bell in Chapel Hill. Duke dropped to 1-19 in its last 20 meetings with its Tobacco Road rivals, and the Blue Devil seniors suffered yet another heartbreaking loss to North Carolina.
In the end, much of that was because Duke couldn’t do what it had done for more than a month: hide its deficiencies in the running game.
“When you’re unable to run the ball like we’ve been, somebody as good as they are exposed us,” Cutcliffe said. “We just didn’t get it done.”
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