By BRYAN STRICKLAND

bstrickland@heraldsun.com; 419-6671

DURHAM -- After some serious soul searching, David Cutcliffe finally went to bed early Friday morning knowing that he planned to remain Duke’s football coach.

When he got up before sunrise, Cutcliffe was relieved to find that he felt even better about the difficult decision, one that he made public hours later with the announcement that he no longer was under consideration for Tennessee’s head coaching job.

“I didn’t go to bed until late. I was dealing with this until 2:20, 2:30 in the morning. I wanted to make a decision before I went to sleep, and then if I woke up as Duke’s coach, then I knew I’d done the right thing,” Cutcliffe said in a telephone interview Friday morning. “I didn’t sleep very long, if at all, but when I got out of bed at 4:10, I was Duke’s coach. I knew that.

“So I came on into work like I always do, and I’ve had a wonderful morning. It’s as much normal as it can be.”

The previous 24 hours were anything but normal, with Cutcliffe weighing whether to remain at Duke, a school that he’d never even visited until a little over two years ago, or to go to Tennessee, a school where to spent 19 years as an assistant.

“I’m used to making a lot of decisions with that 25-second clock that we have. This wasn’t a 25-second clock decision. I will say that,” Cutcliffe said. “But this is not a decision that I have any regrets. It’s not a decision that not one iota of me says, ‘Gosh, did I do the right thing?’

“We all have usually buyer’s remorse to some level. I have no buyer’s remorse.”

Cutcliffe said that he didn’t officially let talks with Tennessee get to the point where he was formally offered the job, but he did acknowledge that there had been talks.

He didn’t specifically say whether reports suggesting that an unwillingness on Tennessee’s part to allow him to bring his entire coaching staff short-circuited a deal, but he did say that he would have insisted on taking his entire staff.

Cutcliffe is expected to further discuss his decision to remain in Durham later today.