Duke football clears its own path to ACC championship

• Duke faces Florida State on Saturday in the ACC title game%2C a first for the Blue Devils
• Duke won 10 games in a season for the first time in its history
• %22They have to believe in you. You have to be the hope%2C%22 coach David Cutcliffe says of recruits

DURHAM, N.C. — The academic standards were too strict. The stadium was old. Practice facilities were awful. Attendance was down. The football team had won just 10 games in eight years.

David Cutcliffe knew all the reasons why he wasn't supposed to succeed at Duke; he came up with them himself. They filled up a long list he and his staff made right after they were hired in December 2007.

"We wrote every little reason a prospect wouldn't come," Cutcliffe said this week in office. "Once you identified (them), you actually found out what you had to do. It's really that simple. … We worked on little things at a time.

"It's kind of like cutting the grass — or something that's very visual. When you finish, it looks better. I'm making something look better, and you can see it."

The lawn — er, the Duke football program — looks pretty good these days. The Blue Devils have won 10 games for the first time in school history, and they just won their first ACC Coastal Division title. On Saturday, they will face No. 1 Florida State in the ACC championship game.

But back to that grass. It represents more than a complete transformation from irrelevancy to the ACC title game; it represents, as Cutcliffe describes it, a necessary culture change.

And it's also quite literal.

"When I say cut the grass, literally cut the grass," said Cutcliffe, who was named Walter Camp 2013 Coach of the Year on Thursday. "We pick up litter. We pull weeds. I picked up maybe 144 Gatorade bottles by myself one day early after I'd taken the job — tossed over, into the high grass that surrounded part of the practice field, in and amongst rusted sleds that hadn't been moved.

"Everything, to me, matters."

***

Cutcliffe found a pickup truck, loaded up the sleds and discarded them at the dump. Presentation matters to Cutcliffe; it's especially important when you're trying to build and maintain a brand.

He began having his players all wear the same gear in the weight room and dress well while traveling to and from games. He banned players from wearing earbuds while walking through campus to the stadium during their pre-game ritual.

"Everybody asks, 'How do you change a culture?' You change a culture," Cutcliffe said. "Practice makes permanent. Whatever it is you practice, on the field, off the field, academically — it becomes who you are. …

"I wouldn't feel good about who we are if we compromised our values. We're not going to do that in recruiting. There are so many people now who are willing to compromise whatever it is they believe for ability. I personally think that's a mistake."

When he arrived in Durham, Cutcliffe couldn't simply recruit junior college players or fill his roster with transfers — short-term fixes that some of his peers have used to smooth over transitional periods. He couldn't do that at an academically rigorous school like Duke, nor did he want to. He wanted to build something long-lasting.

But when you have no football tradition to fall back on — and just 10 wins in the previous eight seasons — recruiting can be challenging. You're selling prospects on the idea of success, the abstract concept of hope.

"You sell yourself," Cutcliffe said. "They have to believe in you. You have to be the hope."

Said junior quarterback Anthony Boone: "It was one of those things where you just kind of had to go there not knowing what was going to happen and just keep playing football."

***

At first, Duke coaches struggled to find talented players. High school coaches wouldn't show them the guys they requested to see, only "Duke" prospects – players not expected to be good enough to compete at high-level ACC schools. "It was never disheartening, but it was predictable," Cutcliffe said.

He pitched recruits on a Duke education and also the commitment the school had made to his program (which would show up in the form of new practice facilities and plans to renovate the stadium). Eventually, Cutcliffe and his staff found the right pieces, the players who had faith in them, too.

"When Coach Cut first recruited me, he told me this vision of Duke building a football program, a contender in the ACC, someone that will compete for ACC championships," senior cornerback Ross Cockrell said. "That's what I believed was going to happen. That's why I came to Duke, because I wanted to be part of that vision."

The 2007 recruiting class – the last under former coach Ted Roof – was ranked 79th in the nation by Rivals and featured four three-star commits. To compare, Cutcliffe's 2014 class is ranked 54th and has 11 three-stars.

Along the way, results on the field have mirrored the ups and downs that generally come along with program-building. There were those four wins in Cutcliffe's first year, and five the next. Two three-win seasons. Last year's heartbreaking loss to Virginia Tech — a 20-0 first-quarter lead withered away as the Hokies scored 41 unanswered points. This year's rewarding rematch — a 13-10 Duke win, its first against a ranked team on the road in 42 years.

Cutcliffe, ever the meticulous planner, already has the next patch of grass planned out to mow. He wants to win at least one ACC championship. He wants to build a streak of bowl game appearances and a streak of winning seasons.

He can cross that first one off the to-do list if Duke pulls off the upset Saturday.

"We know that we have a great challenge this Saturday playing the No. 1 team in the country, and we know that nobody is going to give us a chance to win," said David Harding, a redshirt senior offensive guard. "Really, that's just business as usual for Duke football."

An avid reader, Cutcliffe said he just finished Malcolm Gladwell's newest book, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants.

"Appropriately named – for us," Cutcliffe said, smiling.