Duke football’s Military Bowl win completes rapid rise. Now the Blue Devils want more

A year and a few weeks ago, Duke sought a new and better vision for its floundering football program.

The decisions school leaders made then brought more success, and at a faster rate, than anyone imagined.

“I wish I could say that I took out a napkin and wrote nine wins on it back in August,” Duke president Vince Price told The News & Observer on the field after the Blue Devils beat UCF, 30-13, in the Military Bowl on Wednesday. “I don’t think anyone expected that turnaround to be as rapid as it’s been. We’re just thrilled and excited. The kind of leadership that our coaching staff brings to the program. You see this in the players. They’ve stepped up. They’ve matured over the course of the semester, over the course of the season. So I feel wonderful about the future.”

From the darkness of five wins in 23 games over the past two seasons, including 13 consecutive ACC losses, to the Military Bowl win that gave the Blue Devils (9-4) their most wins since 2014.

That’s where coach Mike Elko and his staff took Duke, with many of the same players, this season.

“I had no clue that when I came to Duke we’re gonna be where we are,” said safety Darius Joiner, a graduate transfer from Western Illinois who finished as the team’s leading tackler with 97. “I just trusted the vision Coach Elko had and just came in and worked hard every day.”

Beating UCF, a team from the American Athletic Conference that will join the Big 12 next season, is an example of how the Blue Devils overachieved to qualify for a bowl and then went a step further as the season progressed.

Over Duke’s first 11 games, it had not defeated a team that finished with a winning record. So the Blue Devils beat Wake Forest, 34-31, in their final regular-season game and toppled UCF with ease on Wednesday to further legitimize their accomplishments.

Even when the coaches and players were feeling good about all they had done, they found a way to do more.

“From where this team was, this program was, walking off the field at the end of the 2021 season to walking off the field as the 2022 Military Bowl champions,” Elko said, “nobody can understand the amount of work that went into that, the amount of character that went into that.

“This is not a day and age where people grind through hard times where people stay and stick together. Everybody in our organization that ended the season showed up here to be part of this bowl. Every coach. Every player. You don’t see that.”

Duke’s nine wins this season nearly matched the total number of wins (10) the program posted during the previous three seasons combined.

At Elko’s introductory press conference on campus last December, Duke athletics director Nina King emphatically stated “we got our guy” after hiring the former Texas A&M defensive coordinator who had never been a head coach at any level.

She repeated that statement after the game on Wednesday, while saying she was “incredibly proud of these young men, the coaches and the staff for what they’ve done all season.”

Now the job, of course, is for Elko and his staff and the players to build on this season and accomplish even more in 2023 and beyond.

Even while going 9-4, the Blue Devils know they could have had two or three more wins this season. Duke’s ACC losses were by narrow margins — 23-20 to Georgia Tech in overtime, 38-35 to North Carolina and 28-26 to Pittsburgh.

“I’m kind of a guy that’s never really satisfied,” Duke sophomore quarterback Riley Leonard said. “So, I look back at the season with nine wins, but I expect 12, 13, 14, going into the national championship. So my eyes will be set on next year, probably tomorrow or the next day.”

Leonard is part of a host of key players returning to the offense next season. He completed passes to eight different players in the Military Bowl and all eight, like him, are returning next season.

Eight of the 11 defensive starters are expected to return as well, with Joiner and Datrone Young having exhausted their eligibility and linebacker Cam Dillon not planning to use his final season of college football eligibility following his graduate transfer from Columbia.

Leonard noted that the Blue Devils didn’t have any players opt out of the bowl game. Even three players who are in the transfer portal, linebacker Rocky Shelton, wide receiver Darrell Harding and cornerback Tony Davis, kept practicing and were in uniform for the Military Bowl.

“That goes to show you the culture that we have,” Leonard said, “and the culture that we’ll have for a long time.”

Building a strong football program set up to have this kind of success regularly isn’t easy at a prestigious private school like Duke. Simply making bowl games in four out of every five seasons would be an accomplishment worth celebrating.

But Elko has already established the foundation for such things. Duke played nearly flawless football in beating UCF, committing just one penalty and not turning the ball over.

That attention to detail and the togetherness Leonard referenced are important traits the Blue Devils must maintain.

After all Elko and the Blue Devils achieved this season, there’s no reason to believe they’ll fail in that endeavor.