DURHAM, NC – In Manny Diaz’s new office here at Duke University sits a commemorative football decorated with the score from a football game:
Duke 45.
Miami21.
On October 22, 2022, 10 months after the Miami Hurricanes fired Diaz as coach, the Duke Blue Devils defeated them with a bang at Hard Rock Stadium. Diaz was not part of either program at the time. In fact, he was on the staff at Penn State.
And yet that football is in his new office.
There’s little point until the backstory is revealed. Current Duke strength coach David Feeley was part of the staff that defeated the Hurricanes in 2022. He gifted the football to Diaz with perhaps an understandable meaning: We won that for you.
Almost exactly two years later, Diaz is five games into his second chance as a head coach and hasn’t lost yet.
The Blue Devils are 5-0 for the first time in thirty years, two wins shy of a school-record nine-game losing streak and somehow not ranked in the Top 25.
That’s only half. Diaz’s team did not receive a single vote in the poll.
“It doesn’t matter,” Diaz said in an interview with Yahoo Sports on Tuesday. “Nobody remembers who was in the rankings after week 5 a year ago. By appreciating that, we did not get to 5-0.”
Their absence from the rankings is not without reason. Few if anyone expected them here.
The fact that Duke is one of 19 remaining undefeated teams in the Football Bowl Subdivision is one of the sport’s standouts each month of the college football season, right on par with undefeated Army, Navy, UNLV, Indiana and Rutgers.
After all, Duke has a new coach (Diaz), a largely new staff, a new quarterback (former Texas backup Maalik Murphy) and an almost completely rebuilt defensive front. Perhaps most surprising of all, this team practiced with five healthy offensive linemen in the spring and now it’s a unit that has emerged as a bright spot with eight linemen transfers this offseason.
Getting to this point was obviously not an easy job. The Blue Devils trailed in the fourth quarter in three of those five wins. They needed a final, tying field goal against Northwestern just to force overtime; they trailed UConn by four for a 56-yard lead, which took the lead; and most recently they stormed back from a 20-0 deficit to stun rival North Carolina 21-20.
Return of children? More like sewer rats.
The motto of the program – drag opponents into the sewer – is derived from Feeley’s offseason conditioning program, where he fights with grit until the bitter end, occasionally getting nasty and pressuring the opponent for four quarters. Duke has outscored its opponents 40-6 in the fourth quarter this season.
“Guys believe we get stronger as the game goes on,” Diaz said. “There’s a belief in that.”
There’s also faith in Diaz, a 50-year-old who got his dream job (Miami in 2019), was unceremoniously fired from that dream job (after three seasons), returned as defensive coordinator (at Penn State) and is now back in the big chair.
Duke athletic director Nina King hired Diaz after Mike Elko left for Texas A&M.
“I talked to a lot of people in Miami,” King said. “I felt like I understood what was happening there. I thought, ‘Let’s give him a chance.’”
What exactly happened in Miami?
Diaz finished with 21 wins and 15 losses, never had a losing record in conference play and, he believes, fielded a team in 2020 that would have won 11 games (not eight) if the Hurricanes had played a traditional schedule and not one due to COVID changed schedule. slate.
The ending played out in public. In his final season, the Hurricanes won five of their last six games and ended the year with, as it turns out, a 47-10 victory over Duke. The late-season run did nothing to quell speculation about Diaz’s job status and the school’s intent to pursue Oregon coach and former Miami lineman Mario Cristobal.
After that last game against Duke, Diaz and the staff started recruiting. As they spent a week traveling around visiting players, speculation continued, and the school — then without an athletic director — made no public statement supporting the coach.
His message to the staff: we won’t know until they tell us.
“You have to keep going,” he said.
It wasn’t easy.
“There was a state of unrest,” said Feeley, Diaz’s strength coach at UM before transferring to Duke to join Elko in 2022. “Guys were a little nervous. They knew something was wrong. Everyone knew it. That was pretty tough.”
The late-season run had enlivened Diaz. His team didn’t give up. The locker room started to bond. Things came together.
Since his discharge, he has been looking for that feeling.
“If the plug is pulled on that, you want to recapture that,” Diaz said.
He was so injured by the fire that Diaz moved to Pennsylvania to join Penn State as defensive coordinator, a move he describes as “geographically far from Miami, but also as far away as you can be in any form whatever.’
He calls his time with coach James Franklin a “reset” and a “recharge,” and he was given the opportunity to be “choosy” when head coaching jobs opened up. He turned down interest in several jobs, including one in his home state (South Florida).
It was too early to go there again, he thought, and there must be a better option, right? “I never doubted that,” he said.
But why Duke?
The connections began with Feeley, a person King leaned on for advice. After all, he spent all three seasons with Diaz in Miami. He knew him well.
Additionally, Diaz’s own son, Manny III, applied to college at Duke well before the Duke application process. A week after Diaz was hired, Manny III was hired and he is now a freshman.
But for Manny Diaz, there was something even more important in making this decision. In the evolving landscape of college athletics, would Duke invest enough to win and be included in any college football iteration?
“I asked President (Vincent) Price directly in a one-on-one interview,” Diaz said. “What if this happens and that … is Duke determined to remain at the highest level of college athletics? He looked me dead in the eye: “Duke is absolutely committed to competing at the highest level of football.”
This is also echoed by King.
“We don’t want to be left out. We feel like we’re investing, whether it’s resources, people, facilities, etc.,” said King. “We want to make sure our program is in the next iteration, whatever it is. We are in a good position at the moment. I’m not sure you could have said that 5-10 years ago. We will be attractive. We can join that next group of schools, whoever they are, and tear them down.”
That doesn’t mean King isn’t worried about the future.
As one of the nation’s elite academic private schools, Duke’s tuition is as much as four times that of its public school competitors. That’s a financial disadvantage for an athletic department charged with funding the majority of those scholarships.
A full scholarship at Duke costs about $90,000, King said. By comparison, tuition at Clemson is about $16,000.
Like most administrators, King and her administrative staff have working models for potential athlete employment and/or athlete revenue sharing. These concepts could soon become reality.
What then? Many schools do not have enough revenue from ticket sales, donations and television dollars to fund a comprehensive athletic department.
“It gives me anxiety,” she said. “What if football, men’s basketball and a few others are our only sports? “We’ve had a lot of crying at the NCAA, but I really think the financial challenges… we’re coming to a head soon.”
Meanwhile, the Blue Devils continue to prove on the field that they belong. Duke is on its way to a third straight winning season for the second time since 1960-62.
They could get closer to that Saturday, when Diaz and the Blue Devils face Georgia Tech (3-2) in Atlanta. Games against Florida State and SMU follow before a Nov. 2 game at … Miami. The Hurricanes, like the Blue Devils, are undefeated, but unlike the Blue Devils, are ranked seventh nationally.
It’s true. Diaz’s old team and Diaz’s new team could meet undefeated in Diaz’s hometown almost exactly two years after the date of the memorial football in his new office.
Maybe that would be too perfect.
