Saturday stakes

It goes without saying that the ending to this Saturday’s football game was a catastrophic fumble by the men in stripes. Whether it was the downed knee, the illegal blocks or the on-field intrusions, the only call that did not make sense was the one that the referees ultimately settled on. It’s upsetting, and it’s wrong, and the ACC’s recognition of that fact hardly constitutes a silver lining. It stings—and yet somehow, remarkably, that’s a really good thing.

This campus doesn’t need another column to remind it that Duke football is in the midst of a renaissance. Coach Cutcliffe has built a winning program brick by brick, replete with bowl games, NFL draft picks and the sterling reputation that Duke fans pride their student athletes on. Building the culture of a “football school” has taken longer, and maybe that’s to be expected. Tailgate in all of its iterations has been a source of frustration, and students and alumni unaccustomed to a fully-fledged game day still struggle with early wakeups and kickoffs. Nonetheless, it’s getting a whole lot better, and I think this loss illustrated that.

Excluding this season, plays like the one Miami pulled off happen once every hundred tries. That improbability and excitement is what makes sports spectacular, but fans of the Duke program a decade past would’ve been more likely to see that play on SportsCenter than they would’ve live.

That’s not the case anymore. As far as I know, every student on this campus watched what unfolded in real time. More importantly, they watched Thomas Sirk lead the team on a gutsy, game-winning drive just seconds before. They cheered after Jela Duncan’s beastmode-esque touchdown run and howled when Max McCaffrey’s early reception was (incorrectly, I’d argue) ruled a fumble. Those students sound a whole lot like Duke football fans that expect to win, and its only because Coach Cutcliffe and all 108 players on the roster give us every reason to believe they will, time and again.

That’s why losing to Miami, especially in such excruciating fashion, isn’t just painful—it’s unfair. This team is playing for an ACC crown. It’s playing for a bowl game. Hell, someday soon it could be fighting for a playoff spot. Those are measureable aspirations with coveted hardware at the end of them. ACC losses used to dampen optimism that Duke football could become what it is today. Now they are looked at as the roadblocks to double-digit win columns and Coastal Division titles. Those expectations have fostered a deeper investment in the team, and the tangible, pervasive anger that Duke fans feel is a ringing endorsement that, yes, football matters here in Durham.

The next two games are the biggest of the season. Duke plays the only two teams ahead of it in the Coastal Division standings, and the one in first happens to reside just down the road in Chapel Hill. In many ways that showdown will determine the trajectory of the season. The stakes are high, and I expect the interest and investment of Duke fans to be the same. This game matters not as a way to validate Duke’s program or as a mere rivalry game but because this team has been building towards something since two-a-days this summer. Maybe the Miami game was an upsetting and unfair wakeup call, but the impression I’m starting to get is that students, alumni and fans alike are genuinely invested in helping our team get to where they want to go.

Freshmen year, the first Duke football game I attended was against North Carolina. Jamison Crowder’s go-ahead touchdown reception with 13 seconds left gave Duke bowl eligibility for the first time since 1994. It was followed by hordes of students rushing the field to embrace a team that had earned every ounce of celebration it received. If that marked the beginning of Duke’s commitment to becoming a “football school,” then the finish of the Miami game marks an important growing pain. If the final score of a game disappoints you, then that means you’ve almost definitely got a team worth cheering for. In this instance, I don’t think there’s any room for debate.

The final play from this Saturday will go down in infamy for Duke fans. Even the consistently classy Coach Cutcliffe conceded that, “There were no appropriate words for what had happened.” I think most of us feel the same way. But if anything, that loss raised the stakes for this Saturday, not mention every Saturday through the rest of the season. That anticipation wasn’t around four years ago, but it sure feels good right now.