Saturday will be a day of firsts when Pittsburgh travels to Wallace Wade Stadium for its debut road game as a member of the ACC.
In addition to being the first conference tilt between the two teams, each will be looking to notch its first ACC victory of the season when the Panthers (1-1, 0-1 in the ACC) take on the Blue Devils (2-1, 0-1) Saturday at 12:30 p.m.
Last Saturday’s 38-14 loss to Georgia Tech was marked by struggles on both sides of the ball for the Blue Devils, who view this weekend as a chance to rebound and prove they are not a team to be overlooked.
"Our execution is the thing I guess I was most disappointed in, if you had to say disappointed,” Duke head coach David Cutcliffe said. “You don’t ever say, ‘It just happened.’ So we’re putting the premium on how well we execute on both sides of the ball.”
After stepping in for injured starter Anthony Boone, redshirt junior quarterback Brandon Connette put forth an impressive and efficient performance against Memphis, going 14-for-21 for 198 yards and a pair of touchdowns. Last week’s outing against Georgia Tech was not quite as impressive—Connette threw for only 128 yards and no scores, while completing 15 of his 28 attempts.
“Brandon would like to execute better, particularly on third down,” Cutcliffe said. “When you’re a coach you see it all. The execution around him wasn’t fair.”
The players echoed Cutcliffe’s thoughts, stating the blame is not to be placed solely on Connette but rather the offense as a whole.
“We were confident with [Connette] in there,” senior receiver Brandon Braxton said. “The execution was not there. The quarterback gets a lot of the blame, but it was the entire offense.”
The Blue Devils running game, which had been key in its success in the first two matchups, was held to 132 yards on 34 attempts—the lowest number of rushes on the season by 11. Duke will look to change that against a Pittsburgh defense that gave up 213 yards on the ground to New Mexico.
“We need to be more physical, especially with our perimeter blocking,” Braxton said. “We need to turn some eight to 10-yard runs into 20 to 25-yard runs.”
After a pair of dominant performances in its first two games, including its first shutout in 24 years, Duke’s defense was dismantled by Georgia Tech’s spread-option offense.
The Yellow Jackets put forth a 344-yard effort on the ground and nearly out-threw the Blue Devils with 125 passing yards on only eight attempts. Their 469 yards of production on offense were more than the combined 421 yards N.C. Central and Memphis were able to rack up against Duke in its first two games.
“We’re extremely confident in our ability,” redshirt senior cornerback Ross Cockrell said. “Last week’s game we got a couple balls that didn’t bounce our way, and we didn’t force as many turnovers as we wanted to force. But there’s a ton to takeaway from it.”
This week the Blue Devils’ defense will face a more traditional offense as they take on Pittsburgh. Duke will go up against a Panthers offense that is now led by redshirt-senior quarterback Tom Savage.
Savage, who sat out the last two seasons after transferring from Rutgers to Arizona and then to Pittsburgh, has a big arm, giving him the ability to go deep at any time. But Savage has had issues with accuracy in his first two games, already tossing four interceptions.
With Pittsburgh's receiving corps headlined by 6-foot-2 freshman Tyler Boyd and 6-foot-4 redshirt-senior Devin Street, who Cutcliffe called one of, if not the best, receivers in the league, Cockrell and the rest of the secondary will have their work cut out for them.
“They’re going to present challenges for us, there’s no doubt about that,” Cockrell said. “But we’re getting ready for them. A lot of their offense is based off the play-action deep-pass, so if we can limit those I think we’ll have a good chance.”
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