2021 Game Recap – Cut the Cord

I’m going to skip the recap of yesterday’s fourth straight painful loss and get right to what needs to be said. Sorry if you were looking forward to Five Things, but now isn’t the time for that. (We did record a jam session yesterday which I will try to post tonight.)

During yesterday’s game, I said I on Twitter that I would not hold back in my game recap. Here’s what I said:

I don’t remember what specifically caused me to lose my patience and self-control, but it’s about time I come out and say what I’ve been hinting at all season. So, as promised, here it is – it is time for Duke football to move on from David Cutcliffe. The Blue Devils need a new coach. We can appreciate all that David Cutcliffe did from 2008 until 2018 while recognizing that he’s holding Duke back and an impediment to winning. I’ve been talking about trends all season and I’ve been doing it for a reason – once the Blue Devils lost to Charlotte, I had a sense that Cutcliffe wouldn’t fix the problems that had been haunting this team since 2018-ish and we’d see a repeat of what we’ve seen since 2019. That premonition turned out to be accurate when North Carolina absolutely demolished Duke – Cutcliffe won’t make changes. He won’t make adjustments. He won’t adapt to the changing football landscape. And the results speak for themselves – blowout loss after blowout loss. It’s pathetic. We’re every bit as bad as we were when Cutcliffe came to Durham.

If the university cares about football, I don’t know how this can be allowed to continue. I’ve watched the Blue Devils regularly since the 1990s, I have a vague memory of knowing that Duke did well real during Spurrier’s last season, so I can say this with a good deal of authority – this is one of the worst teams I’ve ever watched. This Blue Devils team is just bad. There’s no way around it. This Duke team is getting beat, manhandled and pushed around just like all those teams under Franks and Roof did.

The key difference, though, is this team has a lot more talent than those bad Goldsmith, Franks and Roof teams that went winless. Those teams were often younger, smaller and slower than the other team at every position. That isn’t the case here – our OL and DL can match up with their opposition from a size perspective and the corners play well in coverage (aside from constantly being left alone in single coverage which just about every corner is going to get beat on). We have a good running back, a real good one, and a quarterback who can complete a pass and run (but the staff doesn’t let him, because, you know, idiocy). There is absolutely no excuse for the failure of this offensive staff to put points on the board and to give up 30+ each week.

So, why is it happening? Well, I guess we will do Five Things after all and put the blame where it belongs – on the head coach. Here are Five Things that are wrong with the program right now:

1. Cut promotes people based on time served, not on merit. Zac Roper and Jeff Faris are the perfect examples of bad promotions. Why do we have a former special teams coordinator and a walk-on safety running our offense instead of a former QB or a WR? It’s a good question without a good answer. When you’re on a team or part of a business, and a university football program is a business, you have to produce. Cut has seemed content since 2015 to let people advance based on time served as opposed to merit and performance. That’s a terrible way to run a business. Produce or go home. If results aren’t expected and demanded, you start to slip. Then you fall. That’s what’s happening now. We are falling right into adversity.
2. Cut doesn’t hold people accountable (and this is going to bleed into numbers three and four, because there’s a lot to unpack here). How in the world Jeff Faris still has a job after UNC, UVA and Wake is beyond me. His game management yesterday was terrible. I don’t want to go into the bad plays, but what he’s doing isn’t working. But it isn’t entirely on him, it’s an extension of what happened when Zac Roper ran the offense. And it only took wasting a generational talent at quarterback followed by a jump pass that cost Duke a bowl game to make a change there. Wasting talent is what happens when you don’t hold your staff accountable. Before I leave this point, am I the only one who has noticed that Roper seems to be hovering around Cut all throughout the game? Does he still have some involvement in the offense? If so, why? Look, Faris may be a good person and a nice guy, but, like Donny in The Big Lebowski, he’s out of his element.
3. The defensive scheme has been figured out. We’ve been in a 4-2-5 for years. You have gaps because you don’t have a third LB to fill them. Teams know where those gaps are and run plays to force the LB to come in on runs or drop into coverage on a WR on pass plays. They then go to where the LB isn’t (or just heave it on single coverage). The result – big plays and blowouts. Just like Faris shouldn’t be running the offense, Matt Guerrieri isn’t doing a good job. We keep getting burned on the same plays we’ve gotten burned on since 2015. We also can’t disguise our blitzes. And we don’t adapt. Again, Guerrieri may be a nice guy, but his defense is giving up a lot of points. Despite that, we keep seeing the same press coverage week after week. I’ve had enough. We need to make a change.
4. We’re bad at situational football. I won’t go into the poor use of timeouts and bad use of the Moore package all season, but I will say that the kicking teams yesterday was the worst I’ve seen them. If we brought Scott Boylan in to return kicks, why are we letting Stinson return kicks from the end zone to put us in worse field position? Why not take the touchback? And running backwards on a return (I can’t remember if Stinson did that or not, but it happened)? What in the world is going on? We supposedly have fast players, why not let them have a shot? No knock on Stinson, but there are types of law I don’t practice because those areas don’t mesh well with what I do on a day-to-day basis and because I don’t have enough experience in those areas to do them comfortably. Same here with Stinson – it just isn’t his thing. The staff has to do a better job of coaching players on when to return and has to put players in situations to make plays. I’m not seeing a lot of that from the kicking teams. And, again, it only took until the eighth game of the season for the staff to put someone else back there. You guys watch film all week and practice this stuff, but you’re just now figuring it out?
5. No energy. I have some comments here that could be deemed criticisms of the players. That isn’t the case – pay close attention and you’ll see that. Cut sure doesn’t seem to care on the sidelines. He looks disinterested and not into the game. The team seems to be taking a lead from that because they don’t look like they care on the sidelines, either. I think it’s pretty obvious that Cut has lost the team and the players are going through the motions as a result. But part of why I said that this team is one of the worst to watch is because of the apparent lack of leadership from the players. No one is acting like Koby Quansah, Carlos Wray or Max McCaffrey would when things got tough. As rough as some of those Goldsmith seasons were, the players would fight and compete. They just didn’t have the depth to get more wins. This team wasn’t going to be much better than 4-8, but when you have a chance to get to 5 wins early on, you have to dig deep and come out angry. You have to demand accountability from your teammates and lead by example. I haven’t seen that from the coach or the team this season. Now, I’m not pinning this on the players. This is a reflection of a poor culture that Cut has let take hold. He’s accountable for this. But I will say that the players have to start leading around Cut and take control of this. I don’t see these guys snapping a six game losing streak like we saw happen in 2017. This is a culture problem and it has to change.

There’s no way Ms. King can bring Cut back next season. Cut won’t do what it takes to fix the program. The trends show he isn’t capable of it. If it were up to me, I’d go ahead and cut the cord now and name Boyette or Frey interim coach. Boyette has had a lot of success with RBs over the years and Frey’s OL has been a bright spot in an otherwise disappointing season. It’s been time for a change for a good while now, and yesterday took away any reason to give Cut more time. Thanks for all you’ve done coach, but it’s time for someone else to lead the Blue Devils. I hope you enjoy retirement and come back to Durham often. I’ll remember the good years and won’t fixate on what happened at the end of your time as head coach. Again, I appreciate all you’ve done, but it’s time for a change.

Let me know what you think about what I think in the comments or on Twitter.

Go Duke!