ATLANTA—In Chris Rumph II’s starting debut against Georgia Tech, the redshirt freshman turned the Yellow Jackets’ offensive line into swiss cheese, dominating Georgia Tech’s rushing unit with four tackles for loss and a sack to his name.
Rumph and the rest of Duke’s defense were not about to let last year’s six-straight losses happen again.
Facing an opponent that had just notched 129 combined points against its last two opponents, the Blue Devil defense locked down the Yellow Jackets. A combination of dominant linebacker play and quick adjustments at the defensive line led to Duke stifling Georgia Tech on its homecoming, limiting the home team to just 14 points and its lowest-scoring tally of the season.
“We prepared all week, like crazed animals,” redshirt junior linebacker Joe Giles-Harris said. “We were hungry and wanted to be the most physical team out there. We wanted to dominate at the line of scrimmage. We know that their fullbacks and their quarterbacks are phenomenal athletes and if you let them get some space, our whole thing was get them before they could start moving.”
Without junior linebacker Koby Quansah—who notched nine tackles against Army, another option attack, in the season opener—it was a question whether defensive end-turned-linebacker Rumph would be able to put a stop to Georgia Tech’s version of the scheme.
Tied 7-7 with just more than five minutes left of play in the third quarter, Rumph pitched the tide for the Blue Devils to put the game away. When a hard hit on Yellow Jacket running back Jerry Howard sent the ball sailing, Rumph dove on it to put Duke in the driver’s seat at its 43-yard line. That play flipped the momentum for the Blue Devils, leading to back-to-back fumble recoveries that Duke capitalized on for 14 points and a comfortable advantage.
“Chris Rumph has just grown up in front of our eyes,” Giles-Harris said. “He’s a phenomenal football player. He’s just feeling it out right now. He’s not even close to where he’s going to be in a couple years. That kid is going to be a phenomenal player…. He had a big role in place of Koby Quansah, he stepped up, and he played lights out.”
And Rumph was just the tip of the iceberg for Duke’s defensive unit.
Giles-Harris earned 15 tackles and senior Ben Humphreys contributed another 11 as the rest of Duke’s linebacker corps systematically tore apart Georgia Tech’s offensive scheme. The Blue Devils held the No. 1 rushing team in the nation to just 229 yards on the ground—its second-lowest rushing output of the season.
Even when fifth-year senior defensive tackle Edgar Cerenord was taken off the field with what was later diagnosed as a ruptured Achilles, replacements Axel Nyembwe and Ben Frye held strong in the trenches. Georgia Tech would only score once on the ground through the whole contest with a meaningless rushing drive in the final eight minutes of the match.
“We have a systematic approach to an option offense,” Duke head coach David Cutcliffe said. “We put this system in 11 years ago in the first spring knowing that we had Georgia Tech every year in our division and that we were playing Army and Navy multiple times…. We basically have a playbook that we work in the spring for an option offense so our players have an understanding of what the expectations are.”
In response, the Yellow Jackets adjusted their attack, opting to throw their original rush-centric playbook out the window and try for some attacks through the air. However, safeties Marquis Waters and Dylan Singleton were there with nine combined tackles to shut down any explosive plays.
As tensions on the field rose thanks in-part to Duke’s frustratingly stingy defense, Singleton thrived in the chippy atmosphere. The junior dominated back-to-back attempts in the fourth between small scuffles between plays.
“We don’t like them, they don’t like us,” Singleton said. “We play every play…. When things like that happen, you just want to get everybody calm so nothing like that affects the game.”
With the level of defense the Blue Devils unleashed Saturday, Duke is shaping up to be one of the toughest defenses in the nation—one that won’t let mistakes of the past come back to haunt it.
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