bstrickland@heraldsun.com; 419-6671
A day after Thad Lewis picked apart N.C. State's defense to the tune of 459 yards and five touchdown tosses on 40-of-50 passing -- a performance that earned him National Offensive Player of the Week honors from the Walter Camp Foundation -- Duke coach David Cutcliffe continued to praise his quarterback.
"That's about as good as it gets," Cutcliffe said Sunday, the day after he said Lewis' showing in a 49-28 victory was the best he'd coached. "It was a tremendous job of avoiding the rush and getting the ball thrown on time, and his receivers were ready for him.
"I can't say enough about the job [offensive coordinator] Kurt Roper did preparing him for that ballgame. ... Watching the tape, he was better than what he was in person."
Footage filmed well before Saturday's signature victory undoubtedly played a part in the success enjoyed by Blue Devils. After the game, Lewis gushed about how the game went according to plan -- to say the least.
"I felt confident coming into this game with the game plan that Coach gave us, and they showed us exactly what we saw on film," Lewis said. "They didn't do anything differently, so I felt confident in what we had planned because I knew the plays that we had called were going to beat the coverage that they were playing."
No, Duke didn't have someone sneak into the Murphy Center at Carter-Finley Stadium and steal the playbook out of an unsuspecting player's locker. Rather, Duke's coaches did it the old-fashioned way but they did it better than previous Duke staffs were able to: They tirelessly studied N.C. State's schemes and effectively passed on their findings to their players.
"We've studied them for two years," Cutcliffe said. "We keep a summer log, and we follow all of that stuff on our opponents.
"This shows me that Thad has done his homework. N.C. State has a really nice scheme, a very aggressive scheme, but he was never confused. He studied and he understood."
Duke junior wide receiver Austin Kelly, the beneficiary on five of Lewis' laser passes, said it's one of the first games he can remember having such a powerful understanding of what was coming.
Here's why, and here's something worth looking forward to for Duke fans.
Fourth-ranked Virginia Tech -- which survived a 34-26 scare at Duke a week ago -- and now N.C. State represent the first teams that Cutcliffe and his staff have faced twice since their arrival at Duke.
Cutcliffe's staff is of unquestioned quality, and even some of the key coaches who haven't been at it as long as Cutcliffe have been around coaching their entire lives. Roper's father, for example, was Tennessee's defensive coordinator in the 1970s, while co-defensive coordinator Mike MacIntyre's father was Vanderbilt's head coach in MacIntyre's youth.
Cutcliffe and Co. know what they're doing. They'll be facing Maryland for the first time after the open date, but after that it will be interesting to see how coaching comes into play against five repeat opponents to end the season.
"In the back of your mind you want to smile," Lewis said after the N.C. State game, "because you think your guy should be open because you know what type of coverage they're in."
Time will tell if Lewis will have similar reasons to smile going forward.
