Duke Blue Devils College Football Pregame Quote, 09/02/2024

Opening Statement:
“Right back at it for us, kind of like last week. It says Monday on the calendar, but it’s a Tuesday for us, playing on a Friday night. Looking back at last Friday night in the opener, we’re pleased to get an opening night victory. I think the theme was our identity showing up, really, in all three phases. We created five explosive plays on special teams, that’s two tackles inside the 20, two punts of over 45 yards and we had a 14-yard punt return. We were making things happen in that phase. Offensively, you could see our desire to push the ball down the field and we showed our guys, just a matter of inches separating us from an extraordinary amount of explosive plays. But that is our identity, that’s who we want to be. We want to take those shots and make those shots and then defensively, start to finish, just a dominant performance by our front with all the sacks and tackles for losses. But with all that said, in all three phases, there was a lot to clean up and there’s a lot to improve upon. So, week two, you always hear coaches talk about the big improvements between week one and week two. You see the mistakes and we always talk about hearing the difference between success and excellence. You can be successful at doing something, that doesn’t mean you’re doing it in an excellent manner. We’re just trying to play to our standard. Practice to our standard. We’ll need that because now going on the road to play a Big 10 team in Northwestern, a school that our players know very well having played them in the last couple years and that I know very well having played them the last couple years at Penn State.”

“When they came here last September and lost their 13th game out of 15, they left Durham and since that time, they’re 8-3. We played them two weeks later at Penn State and beat them in Evanston. But since that time, they’re 7-2. They’ve won five straight games. I think they’re 6-1 in one-score games. So, the program really transformed in the fourth quarter against Minnesota with a big 21-point comeback. And since that point on, sometimes programs have to go through what it takes to learn how to win. They’ve learned how to win, they understand how to win in close games, including what they did in their opener against a very, very good Miami of Ohio team.”

“It’ll be a great challenge for us in all three phases. Having seen our players understanding who they are and having gone against them the last couple of years. It’s going to be what you expect playing on the road in the Big 10. It’s going to be a line-of-scrimmage game. Their defense is built to prevent explosive plays, which, as I just mentioned, is a big point of emphasis of what we want to do on offense. They do a great job making things difficult, trying to keep the score down. And then a new coordinator on offense that provides a lot of variety, a lot of looks, but does a lot of great things with the run game, trying to want to run the football. So, it’s a game of controlling the line-of-scrimmage, a game-control type game, and an exciting game for a national TV audience on Friday night that we’re excited to play.”

On the next steps on keeping disciplined with no penalties…
 “You don’t know until the lights come on. I think it went hand in hand, though. I thought our substitutions were on point. We only had one issue with the play clock, we only used one time out the whole game. It just felt like a very clean performance. Now, that being said, when you watch a film, are there some things that were a little handsy in this coverage? I think the best way to limit penalties is to coach them before they happen. So, giving an example, in practice, if you went out there today, you’ll see our defensive backs, they run around with oven mitts on. We’re trying to prevent the holding before the holding happens on coverage because we’re going to want to play tight coverage and sometimes the guys want to grab on jerseys, right? So we’re trying to avoid that. Another example is coaches will coach the result of the play. The coach will be happy their guy knocked the ball down. But in reality, he might have grabbed the guy to do it, and it’s not called in practice but it’s going to get called in games. You’ve got to bury your ego enough to understand that we want to be process-oriented and not worry about the result. In practice, nobody cares and I tell the guys, listen, if you continue to grab a guy like this on crucial fourth-down slant, they’re going to throw a flag for an automatic first down.”

On Maalik Murphy’s performance on Friday against Elon‚Ķ
 “I thought for his first game here, he played well. I really did. I thought his accuracy was really good, especially when you watch him spit out anything that’s short and intermediate range and he’s hitting guys in the face mask. It was impressive to see and some of the ones, the near-misses down the field were hitting fingertips. Those are catches that our guys believe they can make. And certainly, this is the ifs and buts, if we make those the score and the yards are gonna be dramatically different. Like any quarterback in the country, there are going to be a few decisions that he wishes he could have back. I do think our offensive line did a nice job of protecting him against almost all five-man rushes the whole game, they blitzed a lot. So I thought overall, it was a really good performance for a week one game, one for him to build off. I think, talking to Coach [Jonathan] Brewer, he was very impressed with how Maalik was on the sideline, he was very calm and very in-control. Like I said, a very good building block to start with.”

On the comfort level of the players and what to expect from Northwestern…
 “What the film said and what we told them in the meeting when we got back together on Sunday was that we played very hard which was very encouraging. We had very minimal missed assignments, very encouraging, and when you tag that with having very few penalties, one turnover, you make yourself hard to beat, regardless of opposition. A lot of press conferences, coaches will say ‘if Johnny did the thing that we coached Johnny to do’, and the good thing that makes these kids special at Duke is that they want to do what their coach wants them to do. In game one, I was very impressed because I’m learning about them the same way they were learning about me. I was very impressed at how few mistakes we made, and that if we didn’t do things perfectly, if we missed a catch by fingertips, well, that’s a technique that we can improve forever and ever and ever. But if the guy was running the wrong route, now we’ve got a fundamental problem because he wasn’t in the right spot. So knowing what to do and we can do it with maximum effort, we will spend the rest of our lives coaching how to do it and no one ever masters the game, right? So now, we’re just on that pathway, and that’s why we’re excited about the identity as one of the pathways to mastery, because once you understand, you’re going to see all these routes all year long. And what you saw as an incompletion against Elon, if we continue to practice that every week. If you watch [Jordan Moore’s] last one, the one that got called back at the one-yard line, it doesn’t matter who you’re playing against. We told the guys, the helmet sticker on the defender’s head is irrelevant. That is an outstanding route with an outstanding throw placement where the defensive back goes. That guy can have any logo you want to put on there and that’s what we’re trying to get to. It’s a mastery where the opponent really doesn’t matter, if we do our stuff our way, our way works. And so we’re happy that we get to play opponents that teach us where we’re not quite there yet. Elon taught us some things and Northwestern will be another step in that challenge.”