Duke Has Obvious Darian Mensah Question to Answer

It's hard to get a feel for what we can expect from Duke's football program this season. 

After Darian Mensah decided to hit the transfer portal, there was always a sense that Duke wouldn't be the team it was a year ago. Duke won the ACC Championship Game a season ago, an impressive accomplishment when you factor in how some viewed the program before then. 

In this era of NIL, things can change in the blink of an eye. Duke found that out the hard way, and it almost sounds crazy to say, but it just didn't have enough money to keep a guy like Mensah around.

Now looking ahead, it's almost impossible to predict what we can expect from this program. Duke should still be a decent team, but calling it one of the best in the country is likely a bit unfair.

“ESPN's FPI projects every team in this tier to win between 5.8 and 6.4 games this year. Duke, Arizona State and Kansas are projected at exactly six wins. They each have between a 55% and 65% chance of winning at least six. If this were still 2025, the kids would be saying these teams were all in the "six-seven" range, but thankfully, we're past all that. The other thing these teams have in common: replacing a veteran QB. Sorsby, Darian Mensah, Sam Leavitt and Haynes King are all gone. Even Jalon Daniels, who, as best we can recall, had been Kansas' Week 1 QB since Mark Mangino was coaching, is gone.

“Odds are at least one of these teams will catch fire with a new quarterback. Perhaps Alberto Mendoza follows in his brother's footsteps, or Gio Lopez takes off after being reunited with his former OC, or Manny Diaz is granted three wishes by a benevolent genie he discovers by rubbing an old turnover chain, and the Blue Devils end up with an adequate Mensah replacement after all,” ESPN wrote.

The biggest question for Duke will be who can replace all of Mensah's production. If Duke somehow gets the same level of quarterback production that it did a year ago, we could be looking at one of the better teams in America once again. If not, things can be very ugly this year, unfortunately.