Before walking into the Laurinburg Chamber of Commerce's annual membership meeting Tuesday night, David Cutcliffe left his phone in his truck. The next time Duke's head coach picked it up, he had about 80 text messages and 20 missed calls, and he was about to learn, in his words, "how many e-mails and texts a BlackBerry can take at one time." Lane Kiffin had just announced he was leaving Knoxville for the glitz of Los Angeles, of course, but Cutcliffe didn't know that. "I said, 'Holy smokes, World War III started, and everybody forgot to tell Scotland County,'" he told The Sporting News.
These past few weeks—and more locally, last two days—have been about as close to a turf war as a college football coaching search can get. By Friday morning, about 60 hours after the blitz began, Duke Football, improbably and somewhat shockingly, escaped battle as a winner.
That's not something you hear every day.
We're also not used to seeing highlights of Duke's football coach on loop on national television. ESPN's star pundits aren't accustomed to publicly and constantly touting Duke's football coach. And Duke's football coach doesn't regularly turn down overtures from other schools, let alone Tennessee—a real football school, one with a fan base whose passion rivals, if not exceeds, those who follow the goings-on in Cameron Indoor Stadium. (Trust me on the Volunteer faithful's zeal. I've read far too many Tennessee message boards in the last 72 hours. My browser aches from refreshing.)
It's true that when Cutcliffe released his statement announcing his return at a time most undergraduates were still sleeping on Friday, nothing had changed. At 9:09 a.m. Wednesday, Cutcliffe was Duke's head coach. He was on Thursday at 9:09 a.m., and on Friday, he most certainly was. The assistants were the same. The workout schedule was the same. The players were the same.
As much as nothing had changed since Tuesday night, though—well, a lot had.
It was impossible to watch ESPN for an hour without hearing Cutcliffe's name, without being inundated by analysts extolling Cutcliffe's credentials and, on Friday, without learning that a certain football coach had turned down Tennessee to stay at Duke. Quick, send some thank-you notes to Lane Kiffin. He's given Duke Football about as much publicity—and the right kind, too—as the program's had in longer than anyone living on campus can remember.
"You couldn't hire a New York P.R. firm to get what we've gotten on ESPN," said Cutcliffe, sporting a leather jacket with Duke's letters stitched over the heart. "This time of year? I'm sure people were glancing at it saying anything about Duke, thinking we're No. 7 in the country." So what does that change, exactly? "It puts Duke Football on the map more than we already were," tight end Brett Huffman told me.
When the most-recognized college football analysts are going on air—or sending tweets to thousands of followers—to praise Cutcliffe, all press is good press, mostly because of its implications on the recruiting trail. National prospects don't read midweek notebooks and game stories in the local paper. But presumably, they do watch "SportsCenter," and they now know that the coach they might commit to just spurned Tennessee to stay at Duke. High school juniors in rural North Carolina will know it, and so will the sought-after talent in California, where, Cutcliffe said, he walks into high schools "in the middle of nowhere" and everyone knows who he is. And if they don't? You can bet Duke's staff will be telling anyone who will listen.
"We're here to stay. We're here to build a program," said Cutcliffe, repeating the mantra he established when he was introduced on a wintry December day in 2007. "We're grown men—look at the decisions we make. It's got to mean something. I had no intentions of that, but it's a byproduct of it."
These first days of classes put Duke's players on edge. On Thursday night, some players wandered around Yoh Football Center, trying to learn whether their coach would be back. Huffman told his mother—who called "like, every five minutes," he said—last night that he thought there was a 90 percent chance Cutcliffe was gone to Knoxville. "I'm just happy with that 10 percent," he said. Chris Rwabukamba paraded around his apartment at 8 a.m., when the text message from his teammate—"Yes!"—landed in his inbox.
By Friday afternoon, there was closure. Cutcliffe talked about loyalty, and about what Duke meant to him, and he even cited a Bible verse. (Matthew 6:21: "For where your treasure is, there will be your heart also.") Would Cutcliffe have left if he could have taken his assistants? At this point, it doesn't matter. His underlying message on Friday was sufficiently clear: He intends to be at Duke for a long time. What recruit doesn't want to hear that?
On Wednesday, Michael Wilbon, the co-host of ESPN's "Pardon The Interruption," opened the show by spinning Kiffin's departure into a disguised blessing for Tennessee. "Let me get the guy from Duke, David Cutcliffe, who used to coach here—who's a real coach," said Wilbon, donning the perspective of a Volunteers fan. "Let me get him back here and say, 'Happy days are here again.'"
Two days later, those happy days exist. They're just at Duke, instead.
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