The five-win turnaround for Duke’s football team was enough for first-year coach Mike Elko to be voted the ACC coach of the year by a panel of the league’s coaches and media.

Elko and his staff helped Duke go from 3-9 and winless in the ACC last season to 8-4 this season, with a 5-3 league record that put the Blue Devils one game behind UNC in the ACC’s Coastal Division.

Duke is bowl-eligible for the first time since 2018; the Blue Devils' bowl information will be announced Sunday afternoon.

Among the more-impressive aspects within that turnaround is that in Duke’s last six games of 2021, the Blue Devils were non-competitive in second halves, losing by an average of 36.5 points. This season, Duke’s most-lopsided loss was a 35-27 defeat at Kansas.

Elko was hired last December following a roughly two-week process after the resignation of David Cutcliffe, who won the ACC coach of the year twice, in 2012 and ’13.

This was the 45-year-old Elko’s first season as a head coach. In his 23 previous years of coaching, 18 were spent as a defensive coordinator. The three most-recent stops were Wake Forest (2014-16), Notre Dame (2017) and Texas A&M, where he was from the 2018-21 seasons under Jimbo Fisher.