Blue Devils back to work
Duke sets sights on quickly moving on from road win at Northwestern
DURHAM – You’re never as good as it seems when you’re winning and you’re never as bad as it seems when you’re losing is how the cliché goes in college football.
Duke is certainly experiencing the former.
The Blue Devils are 2-0 in the infancy of coach Mike Elko’s tenure at Duke. This week brings a balancing act of sorts; there are mistakes to address and corrections to be applied, but they also want the Blue Devils to be able to soak in some long-sought success.
The focus is, as you might expect, more on correcting mistakes than it is resting on laurels of a 31-23 win at Northwestern on Saturday.
“You put on the tape when you win and you expect every play to be right and it never will be,” Elko said on Monday. “And there’s going to be five or six plays that if they had gone another way, would be the reason why you lost.
“And when you lose a football game, you come in and expect every play to be wrong and that’s not what happens either.”
The instant gratification – at least, that’s what it is two games into the season – is the rewarding part. Duke’s spring and summer conditioning programs weren’t the easiest of slogs, so starting the season with a couple of wins instead of the alternatives is a nice reward for the hard work completed in the dog days of summer.
This comes back to the “now” of the matter, though – that’s the “N” in Duke’s G.R.I.N.D. acronym that’s been so clearly established.
“The reason why that is part of our acronym is because that’s the only thing that’s ever going to matter,” Elko said. “You can look around college football every single weekend and realize that if you don’t stay focused on the task at hand, it’s very hard to have success.
“That’s just the nature of college football today.”
That means Elko and his staff’s goal for the week is keeping their team dialed in. It’s not the easiest task following a big road win, riding the emotional rollercoaster of a hot start and hang-on-for-dear-life finish, and then coming home to face an in-state FCS opponent that’s 0-2.
Winning back-to-back games isn’t a foreign concept; the Blue Devils were a 3-9 team last season but had a three-game winning streak, and are one game into playing the same three teams this season.
But success obviously has been elusive for a program that was 10-25 in the last three seasons, with four of those wins in the ACC.
“I don’t think what happened in that game was luck,” Elko said. “I think Jaylen Stinson played extremely hard to the end of that game and popped the ball out. Obviously that won us a football game. But I don’t think … things are lucky. I think things happen because of preparation and I think we’re preparing really well right now.”
Just like winning the opener in impressive fashion didn’t accomplish any long-term goals for Duke, getting to 2-0 with a road win against a Big Ten team doesn’t mean the Blue Devils have suddenly arrived.