When Mike Elko first coached in the ACC, he encountered a Duke football team that gave him fits.
“I came here in 2014, and played a Duke team that was extremely talented, extremely physical, and beat us all over the field,” Elko said Monday. “So my experience of Duke is just that.”
Duke football hasn’t been that for the last two seasons, losing 17 of 18 ACC games while going 5-18 overall.
That’s why Elko stood at a temporary podium erected at Duke’s Pascal Field House indoor practice field speaking as the Blue Devils new head coach.
His job, as of his Friday hiring to replace David Cutcliffe, is to get the Blue Devils back to where Cutcliffe led them not that long ago. Elko arrived in Durham over the weekend from College Station, Texas, where he’s been Texas A&M’s defensive coordinator the last four seasons.
In 2014, he was a first-year coach on Dave Clawson’s Wake Forest staff. Duke had gone 10-4 in 2013, winning the ACC Coastal Division championship and finishing No. 23 in the final Associated Press poll.
The Blue Devils followed that up with a 9-4 season in 2014, including a 41-21 win over Wake Forest in the regular-season finale at Wallace Wade Stadium.
So, as Elko said, he has first-hand experience with how good Duke football can be. The Blue Devils have been poor the last two seasons and, combined with a 5-7 record in 2019, have strung together three consecutive losing seasons with no bowl appearances since 2018.
That led Duke athletics director Nina King to part ways with Cutcliffe and bring in the 44-year-old Elko.
For his part, Elko didn’t express any patience for the process of turning Duke back into a winning football program.
“Why Duke?” said Elko, a first-time head coach. “I believe that now is the time for Duke football. The Duke brand is nationally recognized as a brand of excellence. The combined accomplishments of this university and academics and athletics is truly unparalleled. We have a world renowned faculty, we have an amazing group of coaches that have achieved nothing short of greatness in their fields.
“The amount of ACC championships and national championships that this university has brought to Durham is amazing. And now it’s time for football to get on that level. It’s time for football to hold its end of the bargain and elevate itself to be in a national brand and a nationally recognized program.”
It’s a big challenge, one that Cutcliffe accomplished in the middle of his 14-year tenure with Duke when he took the Blue Devils to six bowl games over a seven-season period from 2012-18.
But that challenge has proven difficult to sustain, as evidenced by the recent slide that led to staff changes.
King, though, discovered enough good things about Elko to believe he’s the man for the job even though he has no previous head coaching experience. Duke discussed the job with current head coaches, like Troy Calhoun from Air Force and Marshall’s Charles Huff.
Former Dallas Cowboys head coach Jason Garrett wasn’t shy about expressing his interest in the job.
Yet King hired Elko, who’s worked as an assistant at places like Fordham, Richmond and Bowling Green as well as Power Five programs Wake Forest, Notre Dame and Texas A&M.
“He’s ready,” King said. “He’s prepared. I mean, talking to the folks that at A&M, Notre Dame, Wake. We talked to a lot of people to really understand. Is he ready for this? Is he prepared? Of course, when we talked to him, we got it from him. But we did our homework and he’s ready.”
Elko’s first defensive coordinator assignment came with the Merchant Marine Academy, a Division III program, in 2001. He’s led defenses since then at Fordham and Hofstra prior to Bowling Green, Wake Forest, Notre Dame and Texas A&M.
That’s a lot of stops and a lot of responsibility for the former Penn safety who helped the Quakers win the 1998 Ivy League championship.
“Where he’s been and how successful he’s been at all of his previous stops,” King said. “I mean, in a fairly young career. I mean, he’s 44 years old. It’s not like he’s, he’s been in the business forever. But what he’s done, the places he’s done, he was really attractive.”
Al Bagnoli, the current Columbia coach who was Elko’s head coach at Penn, saw coaching traits in Elko early on.
“We’ve had some intellectually very bright kids in this league but he also had a football acumen that was unusual,” Bagnoli said. “You just don’t see it very much. He could absorb and understand everything. It made sense to him when sometimes it doesn’t make sense for a lot of guys.”
All those stops helped Elko make connections with plenty of coaches who are candidates for his 10-person coaching staff. He’s already at work filling those jobs but his first priority is recruiting.
High school seniors can sign with schools for next season starting on Wednesday. Elko’s been reaching out to players who committed to Cutcliffe’s staff to keep them in the Duke fold so he can get a class signed this week.
Even with that, he’s thinking of bigger and better things to come.
“I think we don’t want to sell ourselves short,” Elko said. “I think we want to have the ability to be a developmental program and take kids and make them everything that we can become. But I also think we have a very strong national brand. And I think we want to go beat down doors and knock down doors across this country to find elite level athletes who want elite level academics. And they’re out there, and they exist. And so we’ll find a balance between increasing our recruiting efforts, and maybe bringing in some kids that can help right away with bringing in kids that are more developmental.”
Bagnoli doesn’t see Elko’s talk of championships and elite play at Duke as simple first-day exuberance.
“He’s not going to take a job where he doesn’t think there’s a realistic chance to succeed,” Bagnoli said. “It’s the ACC. You’ve got to play Clemson. But Mike is smart enough, when you peel back the layers, to understand the league. He was in it. He dealt with some academic kids at Wake. He dealt with academic kids at Notre Dame.”
Staff writer Luke DeCock contributed to this article
