Week 12 Preview - Duke

Once you come out flat, its very difficult to regroup. And I wasn’t able to, so this will be another flat performance. Hopefully the players will learn from my mistake and the team will show up ready to play.

Anyway, the most important thing you need to know for this game is the relative talent, as shown below by ESPN.com’s recruiting rankings:

	2007			2008			2009			2010
	GT	Duke		GT	Duke		GT	Duke		GT	Duke
Best	81	78		80	80		80	80		80	78
Top 5	79.4	75.4		78	77.8		79.4	78.4		79	76.8
Top 10	78.5	71.8		77.3	75		78.8	77.1		78.2	75.7
Avg.	75.65	70.1		76.53	74.1		76.85	74.8		77.06	75.3
Total Players	20	11		15	11		21	24		16	13

That is probably a little closer than most people would think. I think Cutcliffe has done a good job recruiting and is steadily making Duke a team that is no longer a pushover. Their 2008 class, and especially their 2009 class, exemplify their upgrade in talent. A class of 24 players is big, and those numbers look pretty good.

But they are still not at talented as we are. And certainly not as deep. And that will be the difference. Paul Johnson does not lose very often when he has better players.

Furthermore, the matchups are not very good for Duke. Their run defense (which would counter our strength) and run offense (which would attack our weakness) are not very good. They only run for 120 yards a game, and only average 3.5 yards per carry. Neither of those numbers are very good. They also allow 192 yards a game, which is not very good. They do allow only 4.7 yards per carry, which is not bad, but it is not great either.

Some people are making a big deal out of the fact that Duke has faced Army and Navy this year, who both essentially run our offense. That does not worry me for three reasons. First of all, while the experience will surely help Duke defend us, we are going to run it with better athletes. Secondly, it may actually help us as much as it helps them, because Paul Johnson probably has a pretty good bead on how they are going to defend us. Finally, both Army and Navy scored more than 30 points on Duke. Yes, Navy lost, but I think that was only because they were flat after beating Notre Dame by 18 the week before. Can you blame them? And they still scored plenty of points once they got going in the second half.

Duke’s strength is their passing attack, but it isn’t even all that good. They do average 265 yards a game, which is pretty good, but that is on over 400 attempts. Meaning they average less than 7 yards per attempt, which is not real good (6.5 = 95^th in the country in fact). They have a collective QB rating on the season of 116. To put that in perspective, GT’s collective QB rating this year is 104, and we have one of the worst passing attacks in the country. Virginia has a 128, and I would not call UVA a “great” passing offense.

Furthermore, our passing defense is actually not bad. We are 13^th in the country in TD passes allowed (although that may be a little inflated because teams wisely choose to run against us in the red zone pretty often), 27^th in pass yards allowed, and 46^th and 52^nd respectively in rating allowed and yards per attempt allowed. Those numbers are not amazing, but they are not too bad.

Lastly, this will be a nice change of pace in that we should be able to compete, and probably even win the battle, on BOTH lines. It will be interesting to see what Al Groh can do as a defensive coach when his defensive line is not getting outplayed.

All of this is of course contingent on us showing up ready to play and motivated. But on senior day, on a three game losing streak, fighting for bowl eligibility, I sure hope we don’t show up flat.

Assuming we show up ready to play, I think you’ll see our defense have a pretty good day. Duke should move the ball. They are actually a pretty good offense, and Cutcliffe is a good offensive coach. But since our D line should, SHOULD, be able to compete, and our pass defense is capable of playing well, I look for us to actually force some field goals for a change when they do move the ball. I don’t think they will score many TD’s on us. On offense, I expect us to score a lot of TD’s. Most every drive that we don’t kill with penalties or turnovers in fact.

Duke’s best chance is being able to confuse Tevin. Paul Johnson has stated that Duke will probably mix it up on defense (if they use the same gameplan they used against army and navy). Miami, for the most part, played a pretty vanilla scheme and just relied on their athletes to get off our blocks and pursue the ball. That worked because they have really good athletes, and because we made costly, untimely execution mistakes, but according to coach we pretty well understood what they were doing. If duke utilizes a bunch of different looks, they may be able to confuse Tevin.

But even if they do, I expect Tevin to be able to figure it out. He has been practicing in this offense for 2 years now, and he was the starter for all of spring practice while Josh was out recovering from his surgery. He is not exactly a beginner, even though his playing experience is limited.

In short, I expect us to win by about 17-21 points. If Duke plays well, and we don’t, they certainly could win. And if we show up flat they will win. But I think if we play at least a decent game, like the effort we gave against UVA, VT, UNC, etc, then we should be able to win this game without too much trouble.

Let’s Go Jackets!