My Take: The fine line of bowl prep

Dispel any notion you have that Duke’s date with UCF in the Military Bowl will be the launching point of the next football season.

There’s a trophy at stake and for some of Duke’s key contributors, it’s the final time they’ll put on a Blue Devils uniform. For the ones who will return next season, it’s their chance to put their collective best foot forward as members of Duke’s football program.

“This is kind of its own entity now, for us,” coach Mike Elko said. “We look at this as championship season. That’s kind of the way we talk about it.”

Elko continued with an evaluation that every team gets 12 regular-season games, and the performance across that slate determines whether you get a 13th.

Bowl preparation is not the time to cast aside veterans of your program who poured everything they had into the season. The bowl trip is a reward; there are few bowls that offer better experiences than the Military Bowl.

And yet, in the same vein …

The clock is already ticking on Duke’s development for next season.

Elko said that the major contributors — those who have reached designated snap counts — would ease into bowl preparation. The best example here is on the defensive side of the ball, where defensive backs Darius Joiner, Jaylen Stinson and Brandon Johnson, and linebacker Shaka Heyward, all played between 749-800 snaps (per Pro Football Focus).

“And then there’s a group, not necessarily freshmen only, but there’s a group that are below that snap count,” Elko said. “Those guys didn’t really get to have the role that they wanted, completely this year on offense and defense. There are a lot of guys who helped us win football games and played big roles in us winning football games.

“But all of those guys want more. So this is an opportunity for those guys to craft their skill and develop … I think for those guys, it’s a great launching point into spring practice.”

It’s a fine line to walk. But Duke is going to need development from certain areas of its roster before the 2023 season kicks off, and there’s no sense in waiting until the calendar flips to start that process.

Rosters are coming together earlier than ever in college football and it still feels irresponsible to project who’s going to be good and who’s not next season.

If we’re going on what teams looked like this season and what they’ll look like in the amorphous blob of a division-less 14-team ACC next season: The Blue Devils have their work cut out for them.

Duke’s non-conference schedule looks similar — with one gold star of a caveat. Connecticut ditched Randy Edsall and his prop bet of a contract and in Jim Mora’s first season, the Huskies notched a win over a ranked team (Liberty) and punched a bowl berth. There’s an FCS game (Lafayette), and Northwestern was 0-11 on U.S. soil this season, the first loss being Duke’s 31-23 win in Evanston, Ill.

And here comes Notre Dame, at 8-4 not up to the impossible standard for Marcus Freeman’s first season — but riding a 28-game winning streak in regular-season matchups against the ACC.

It’s the conference matchups that drive home the likelihood of Duke’s schedule being more challenging than it was this season.

Five ACC teams didn’t qualify for a bowl game this season and Duke played all five — Boston College from the Atlantic Division, and then the three Coastal teams with new coaches (Miami, Virginia and Virginia Tech) and the one that fired its coach in September (Georgia Tech).

You can only play who’s on your schedule, and it looks like there will be some karmic balance applied in next season’s ACC slate.

Duke plays one of those five teams (Virginia) next season. Otherwise, the Blue Devils face five former Atlantic teams that are entering their bowls with a combined 42-19 record, plus games against the last two winners of the Coastal Division in UNC and Pittsburgh.

The tenure of coaches can be a good measure of a program’s stability; pending any late-carousel movement, Duke will play the four longest-tenured coaches in the ACC next season. That doesn’t include UNC and Florida State teams likely to enter the season with top-25 rankings.

This isn’t a matter of reverting back to low expectations for a Duke program that struggles to gain the benefit of the doubt. Elko proved in Year One that expectations and standards should be elevated.

It is a matter of pointing out that the schedule lined up for Duke last season in a way that it probably won’t in this next one.

Here’s where the reminder comes in that you saw Duke take a jump forward during games this past season. The work for that five-win turnaround didn’t occur on Saturdays this fall; it was mostly accomplished in the eight-month span leading up to the season, through workouts, spring practices, summer weightlifting and conditioning, and ultimately fall camp.

It’s easy to assume that kind of growth occurs again; the reality is for Duke to keep ascending the ACC’s ladder, the Blue Devils need to take bigger strides in the next eight months.

So the fact remains: Duke’s game against UCF in the Military Bowl isn’t a jumping-off point for the 2023 season.

Soon after it ends is when the most important work will begin, though.