Duke understood entering this college football season that it had a chance to be decent, but not great.
After losing Darian Mensah, it felt like Duke needed to do a lot, and unfortunately, it didn’t. Mensah, undoubtedly one of the better quarterbacks in all of college football, has proven at the University of Miami that he can be among the best quarterbacks in the country, and he will continue to do so for a Hurricanes team that has a chance to win a championship.
Regarding Duke’s new-look offense, there have been some strange moments over the past couple of months in training camp and the first few weeks of the season.
There have been times when the offense has looked like it can be decent, but ultimately, it doesn’t really feel like a unit that’s good enough to compete at the highest level.
While there have been frustrating moments, Manny Diaz has suggested multiple times that he believes his team will figure things out. As much as some Duke fans have had questions over the past couple of weeks, I’d trust their head coach to get that job done.
"If you look at the turnover that we had, and not just the new faces, but the new faces and when they arrived- I mean, these are guys who've been playing together now for three and a half, four weeks basically,” Duke’s head coach said, per Duke Wire. “So it would only stand to reason that they'll improve as the year goes on.”
“It's going to have to get ironed out quickly, obviously, because you can't be one-dimensional and expect to win games, but we've seen it,” he said. “We've seen it in practice. There's a difference between taking it from practice to a scrimmage or from a scrimmage to a game, but I suspect that we'll make a big jump. I'm confident in the guys that we have, and certainly conceptually we know what we're doing.”
A lot of this is ultimately going to fall on Walker Eget, as much as that might be unfair for a young man who is just coming into the university and trying to learn what it’s like to play at such a big-time school. In comparison to what he’s dealt with in the past, this is a much different game. I wasn't sure he was the perfect guy to do a lot of what Duke needs, but the young man played well on Saturday in the win against Illinois.
