It really doesn’t seem like that long ago that Sydney Sarmiento and Justin Foxx were hoisting David Cutcliffe up to carry him off the field at Kenan Stadium, Duke having beaten its rivals on the road to become the first Triangle team to win its division and clinch a spot in the ACC title game.
Eight years later, almost to the day, Cutcliffe walked off the field at Wallace Wade stadium defeated and alone after yet another blowout loss. His last at Duke, as it turned out. He accepted the obvious Sunday after taking the Blue Devils from the very bottom to the top, and then all the way back down again.
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The precipitous collapse of Duke football — 6-23 since starting the 2019 season 5-2 — doesn’t take away from what Cutcliffe built the program into, always with class and character. It just made it more painful to watch. When Duke was consistently terrible, at least no one was under the illusion it could be any different. (“You know what they say, it’s better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” “Try it.”)
The way things ended Saturday, a 47-10 loss to Miami that was Duke’s sixth straight by 25 points or more, didn’t leave Duke a lot of options. Cutcliffe wasn’t just a victim of standards he helped set; this kind of two-season run is unacceptable under any circumstances.
The good news for whomever comes next, and this is a credit to Cutcliffe, is that they won’t have to undertake the same ground-up program construction Cutcliffe did.
The comparison here is to Wake Forest: Jim Grobe worked similar miracles to take a perennial also-ran to an ACC title, then lost his way a little bit, thanks in large part to recruiting changes and staff departures. Dave Clawson came in, stole the bits he liked from the Grobe playbook, added a few wrinkles of his own and had things up and running again in three years.
Clawson, as Duke’s next coach will, didn’t inherit much talent but he did inherit a blueprint for success at a school that doesn’t have a lot in common with most of its ACC or Power 5 peers, one that allowed him to get things back on track relatively quickly.
The injection of funding that comes with every new coach will give Duke a chance to play catch-up in the facilities race after falling far behind the pack, an advantage Cutcliffe didn’t have in his final few seasons.
Cutcliffe did the impossible at Duke, taking the Blue Devils to a run of six bowl games in seven years and winning one for the first time in generations. His successor has a chance to pick up where Duke left off a few years ago.
So who should that successor be?
East Carolina’s Mike Houston probably tops the list, a proven program-builder who has experience in a difficult recruiting situation at The Citadel. You wouldn’t normally expect him to leave Greenville after finally getting the Pirates back in a bowl game, but the American he signed up to coach in now looks more like Conference USA.
Then there’s the option option: Army’s Jeff Monken, who used the Paul Johnson triple-option to win consistently somewhere else people said you could never win consistently. Cutcliffe proved you could win at Duke without gimmicks, but there’s a lot to recommend Monken beyond the offense.
It’s entirely possible both of those coaches would prefer to stay where they are, and in that case Duke might have to get creative. Skip Holtz was just fired at Louisiana Tech, but he has roots in the area and state and was able to build winning programs at multiple schools.
Or what about going way outside the box? Jason Garrett, recently fired as Daniel Jones’ offensive coordinator with the New York Giants after losing a power struggle with head coach Joe Judge, is very close to Mike Krzyzewski. Garrett has been a frequent visitor to Cameron and was a frequent host of Krzyzewski during his tenure as coach of the Dallas Cowboys. Garrett went to Princeton, so he would understand Duke’s academic imperatives, but he’s never coached at the college level.
Duke caught lightning in a bottle 14 years ago when Cutcliffe was willing to take on the job — and when he turned down overtures from Tennessee to stay. It didn’t end well. It never does. But his successor, whoever that may be, won’t face the same uphill climb Cutcliffe did to make Duke relevant again.
