Duke’s prior experience against Sam Hartman means little

DURHAM – Each of Duke’s next two games will see the Blue Devils face a quarterback who they beat last season — even though Duke hasn’t played Notre Dame or N.C. State since 2020.

Notre Dame quarterback Sam Hartman was at Wake Forest last season, and N.C. State’s Brennan Armstrong was with Virginia.

While familiarity is nice, it means little in the grand scheme of things.

Literally, the scheme is different.

“You could be living in a cardboard box somewhere and know that Sam Hartman is a really talented quarterback in the college level,” Duke coach Mike Elko said earlier this week. “And so, experience or knowing him — he’s really good. And so we’re going to have to figure out how to control him as best we can.”

The ACC’s all-time leader in touchdown passes has given the Irish exactly what they were looking for when they went fishing for an experienced QB last year. Hartman has completed 70.4% of his passes for 1,236 yards and 14 touchdowns and, perhaps most importantly, hasn’t thrown an interception.

Duke knows Hartman — though, maybe not as well as you’d think. He only played against the Blue Devils in the last two seasons, winning in Winston-Salem in 2021 and throwing for 347 yards and three touchdowns in a 34-31 loss in Durham last season.

And Duke’s second-year staff (with the exception of Trooper Taylor) only coached against Hartman last year (though safeties coach Lyle Hemphill was at Wake Forest for Hartman’s first four seasons).

To scrape the surface of what’s going in the mind of Duke’s coach, the former defensive coordinator:

“What you’re always trying to do is figure out what is the quarterback looking at, what is he seeing and how can you make him uncomfortable in some way, shape or form?” Elko said. “A lot of that is dictated by the offense.

“And so, running the RPO style he was running at Wake created one set of reads. Running a more pro-style system like he’s running now at Notre Dame creates another set of challenges.”

Hartman has started 50 games in his career and, new scheme and all, it’s difficult to confuse a QB who’s seen as much as he has.

“There’s not a lot that you can throw at him that he hasn’t seen before,” Elko said. “We kind of saw that going into the game last year and that’s only gotten better now that he’s gotten around a different group of coaches who can teach him a different way of looking at things. …

“Yeah, I wish we were playing a true freshman quarterback making his first start. But that’s not what we have.”