Duke football head coach Manny Diaz answered questions about his former quarterback Darian Mensah.
After a successful 2025 season in which the Duke Blue Devils won the Atlantic Coast Conference Championship and then their bowl game, expectations this offseason were sky high.
Then the one move that couldn't happen, eventually happened.
In the final hours of the transfer portal, quarterback Darian Mensah opted to enter the portal and leave for Miami. He spent just one season with Duke and was successful, helping them earn that title.
It was a shocking move that left Duke not only surprised but upset about it as well. And now, head coach Manny Diaz is finally opening up about it.
Diaz was asked a few times about the Mensah situation while meeting the media at the annual ACC Kickoff event, offering some honest answers about it all, including potential tampering.
“It’s an unanswerable question because ultimately what it came down to, and this is why it was never an issue for us, is you can only say what you can prove,” Diaz said. “So, to me, it doesn’t matter. And that’s why our issue was never with any other school. The school was very consistent.”
The head coach should be upset about things, especially with how it went down in the final hours. But in the end, it came down to a contract dispute. Mensah believed he was worth more and in this era of college football that's not uncommon for players to believe that.
“The whole situation was simply about a contract that we felt like had to be honored and it wasn’t honored,” he said. “Then what is the ramification of that? And that’s exactly what happened. All parties were satisfied and all parties moved on.”
Diaz chose his words carefully here and it's clear that he's upset, even if he said all parties have moved on. Duke should feel slighted. They had a chance to be even better in 2026 and those chances took a hit with Mensah and other players leaving.
For Mensah, it all came down to other quarterbacks having success at Miami including Carson Beck and Cam Ward. But in the end, it's a tough pill to swallow for the Blue Devils.
