How will Duke football players ease the pain of another narrow loss to UNC? Some never will
As deep as Duke’s reserve of fight is, the Blue Devils’ pain matched that as a thrilling Saturday night turned into a somber Sunday morning at Kenan Stadium.
Playing with third-string quarterback Grayson Loftis running the offense, and a defense that lacked its usual bite, the Blue Devils still built two fourth-quarter leads at rival North Carolina.
Tar Heels quarterback Drake Maye, with help from kicker Noah Burnette’s six field goals, erased both and forced the game to overtime.
Once there, Maye’s touchdown run and two-point conversion pass in the second overtime put UNC ahead for good. Loftis fired his third touchdown pass, but his two-point conversion throw misfired, allowing the Tar Heels to win, 47-45, in double-overtime.
Easing this sting won’t be easy for the Blue Devils (6-4, 3-3 ACC), something their second-year head coach admitted when asked how long that process would take.
“For some of these guys, probably the rest of their life, to be honest with you,” Elko said. “You put everything you have into this game. You work so hard for this, give so much for each one of these opportunities and certainly this rivalry means even a little bit more. I think there’s a piece of them, me included, who will remember this the rest of our life.”
Elko and his staff managed the game offensively about as well as they could under the circumstances. Starting quarterback Riley Leonard has a cast on his left foot as his big toe injury heals. Back-up quarterback Henry Belin IV is recovering from an upper-body injury.
With Loftis starting his second game and playing for just the fifth time as a collegian, Duke relied on its running game mostly over the first three quarters while letting the play clock wind down in an effort to shorten the game.
Loftis completed just four passes over the first three quarters. But when UNC took a 26-14 lead in the fourth quarter, Duke opened up its playbook and Loftis engineered three touchdown drives.
“We knew they were a really talented team,” Elko said. “We knew we were gonna have to just scratch and claw our way, just stay in it and hang in and hopefully give us a chance in the fourth quarter. And you know, I thought we did that.”
Loftis’ final stat line showed 16 of 28 passes completed for 189 yards with three touchdown throws. He also ran for a touchdown. Though his final pass was off the mark as he tried to find Jalon Calhoun in the end zone in double-overtime, Loftis earned plenty of respect in his locker room.
“Let’s talk about Grayson Loftis,” said Duke defensive tackle DeWayne Carter, who’s in his third season as a team captain. “I mean, he did everything he needed to do and some. I couldn’t be any prouder. That kid never flinches. He stood in there and took some shots, took the ball and ran it when he needed to.”
Carter’s defense, though, didn’t do enough to help the gritty Loftis and the Duke running game that produced three touchdowns and a 113-yard rushing night from running back Jordan Waters.
That’s quite a difference from most of this season. Through the first six games, Duke had allowed 9.8 points per game. That’s not been the case, of late, and particularly on Saturday night.
Duke had some success in the red zone, limiting UNC to field goals four times on drives that advanced inside the Blue Devils 15. But those proved to be hollow victories.
The Tar Heels finished with 537 yards, the most yardage Duke has allowed in a game all season. Running back Omarion Hampton ran 31 times for 169 yards with a touchdown. Maye passed for 342 yards, with wide receiver Tez Walker catching seven passes for 162 yards.
After Loftis’ 30-yard touchdown pass to Jordan Moore gave Duke a 36-33 lead with 41 seconds to play, Maye still drove UNC to the Duke 25 where Burnette kicked a 43-yard field goal as time expired to send the game to overtime.
Then Maye put UNC ahead for good in the second overtime.
“Two years in a row, we just couldn’t stop that kid with the game on the line,” Elko said. “Extremely talented kid. He’s unbelievably competitive and sometimes he just wills that team to win. And he certainly did it again tonight.”
For all the stellar coaching work Elko has turned in to pull Duke football from its 2020 and 2021 doldrums to back-to-back bowl seasons, his teams have fallen just short of beating rival UNC in a pair of scintillating regular-season games.
Last season, Maye drove UNC the length of the field in the final minute for the game-winning touchdown in a 38-35 Tar Heels win at Wallace Wade Stadium. Saturday night it took extra football for Maye and the Heels to win.
Despite that loss last season, Duke went 9-4 and beat UCF 30-13 in the Military Bowl.
The job for Elko and the Blue Devils this season is to find a way to rally from yet another tough loss to UNC and finish the regular season out with wins over Virginia and Pittsburgh. Yes, some will never get over Saturday night’s loss. But they have to find a way to move forward.
“When you get punched, you get up,” Carter said. “When you get knocked down, you get up again. There is no choice. There’s a message. I think that’s how we are trained as a team. That’s the grittiness and the grind mentality that we have.”
Despite the pain of the loss to UNC, Elko believes this team is worthy of a strong finish and is planning to help make that true.
“We’ve got a resilient group,” Elko said. “They know they deserve to finish this thing the right way. They deserve to be an 8-4 football team. They deserve to go on and play in a really good bowl game at the end of this season.”
This story was originally published November 12, 2023 at 5:45 AM with the headline "How will Duke football players ease the pain of another narrow loss to UNC? Some never will."