Miami has lived up to expectations and is far and away the best team in the ACC after the first month of the college football season.
That much is beyond argument.
Determining who is the second-best team behind the fourth-ranked Hurricanes isn’t nearly as clear cut.
A case can be made for Virginia, which won 11 games last season and routed NC State in Week 0. The same can be said for No. 21 SMU and Clemson, which is already 2-0 in the conference despite looking anything but impressive since getting embarrassed by LSU in its opener.
Wake Forest has been the ACC’s biggest surprise in the early going while Pittsburgh and Virginia Tech are still undefeated, though admittedly untested.
And then there’s the defending conference champions.
In case you haven’t noticed–and from the size of the sparse crowd at Wallace Wade Stadium last Saturday, even a lot of folks at Duke haven’t–Coach Manny Diaz’s Blue Devils have positioned themselves to make a serious run at defending their surprise 2025 title.
They’re 4-0 with a road win against a Big Ten opponent to their credit, they’ve won eight straight dating back to last season and are ranked 21st in this week’s coaches poll. Even after losing Heisman-quality quarterback Darian Mensah and his favorite receiver Cooper Barkate to league rival Miami, they’re on pace to be an even better team than they were a year ago.
They already own wins against Tulane and Illinois, two of the five teams that beat them in their championship run, with another chance at redemption coming up after a week off when they travel to Atlanta to face struggling Georgia Tech.
“We talk about it like our revenge tour,” wide receiver Jared Richardson said after Duke’s 62-7 thumping of William & Mary last Saturday. “We want to go and make statements when we play these teams that we lost to last year. That’s our identity, just be underdogs and fight.”
It might sound a little disingenuous for a team coming off a championship to be playing the underdog card, but the Blue Devils have a legitimate reason to feel disrespected and undervalued.
It began in the immediate aftermath of their conference title-clinching overtime victory against Virginia when they received little to no consideration for a spot in the College Football Playoff. The chip on their shoulder only grew larger after Miami poached Mensah, even though he still had a season remaining on the two-year name, image and likeness deal he signed with Duke.
As if the Blue Devils needed any more motivation, the ACC gave it to them just before the start of preseason camp when it changed the tiebreaking procedure that got Diaz’s team into the championship game. The adjustment has become known as “the Duke Rule,” a moniker that had the veteran coach fired up at the league’s preseason football media event in Charlotte in July.
“I heard we got a rule named after us. That’s pretty cool, right? The Duke tiebreaker rule,” Diaz said sarcastically. “I want to start by addressing our thoughts on that. Inherent in the narrative of changing a tiebreaker for the conference championship game is the assertion that last year’s team was undeserving of being in the championship game. You hear that word that now there will be more deserving teams in the championship game. I want to push back against that narrative. I think it’s not just false, I think it’s insulting.”
So far, Diaz and his team have answered their critics. And they’ve done it with a much different formula than the one that helped them raise a banner for the first time in 36 years.
After leading the ACC in passing at 285.4 yards and behind Mensah and compensating for a defense that ranked 14th in the league allowing 29 points per game with the conference’s highest-scoring offense, these current Blue Devils have reverted to a more old-school approach built around a physical defense and a relentless ground attack.
Sophomore running back Nate Sheppard leads the ACC at 161 yards per game, while averaging 23 carries per game. The defense, which has held three of its four opponents to a touchdown or less, ranks third in the conference at just 11 points allowed per game.
“We’ve answered every challenge,” Diaz said after the William & Mary game. “We’ve done what we can do up to this point to give the team belief.”
If they keep this up, others might start to believe, too.
–photo courtesy of Duke Athletics