Spectacular Duke upends pedestrian Clemson — and the ACC as we know it — in wild upset
The aisles were clogged with orange with five minutes still to play. The Clemson fans gave up on their team long before the end. Duke never flinched.
The Blue Devils embraced this challenge, opening the season against the yet-again preseason pick to win the ACC, the eventual champion in six of the past eight seasons. It wasn’t just about proving last season’s turnaround wasn’t a fluke. It was proving they could compete with the kind of team that had kicked them around for so long.
They met it. They exceeded it.
They were the more physical team. They were the more explosive team. They were the better team.
“We expected to win this football game,” Duke quarterback Riley Leonard said.
The aftershocks from this one will be felt for a long time, a tectonic shift in the bedrock of ACC football. Clemson looked vulnerable. Ordinary. Pedestrian. Human. The door is open for anyone.
Based on this performance, why not Duke?
The Blue Devils didn’t do everything right in their 28-7 win Monday night. Far from it. But they played well enough, tough enough, to overcome their penalties and turnovers, and they made all the big plays that we’re all used to seeing Clemson make, including a pair of blocked field goals and a forced fumble in the shadow of their own goal line.
Duke didn’t take a step back from last season; the Blue Devils went storming forward unabated. They may have shocked the world, but they barely surprised themselves.
“It’s important on the outside, because I think it makes people believe a little bit more what we’ve been saying since the day I got here,” Duke coach Mike Elko said. “What we’ve been saying internally is this is what Duke football is capable of. We’ve never ever wavered.”
One play encapsulated all of that. Leonard was swarmed over in the backfield, like Clemson’s defensive line has so often done to quarterbacks over the years. But he escaped, and then outran two Clemson defensive backs down the sideline for a 44-yard touchdown.
It was Duke’s first win over a top-10 opponent since 1989, against Clemson, and Steve Spurrier and his boys were in Wallace Wade to enjoy this one. In the final seconds, as the Duke students clambered onto the sidelines and prepared to storm the field, you could almost hear Spurrier cackling, if you listened closely enough. The Clemson fans had booed him when his team was honored, but they were long gone when he got the last laugh.
So the resurrection of Duke football continues under Elko, as big a win as the program has had at Wallace Wade in more than a decade, since Jamison Crowder found space in the end zone to beat North Carolina in 2012, and Duke’s first win over an opponent ranked this high in 29 tries.
They took on the ACC’s standard-bearer, and it wasn’t Duke that found itself wanting.
“We’re not entitled to win,” Clemson coach Dabo Swinney said. “We’ve got to go earn it. and we had plenty of opportunity to get control of that game on multiple occasions and we just didn’t. And that’s how you get beat.”
As the Duke players slowly filtered through the fans and off the field, after Leonard sought out his father and handed him the game ball, as Swinney made the long walk to the visiting locker room, the realization settled in that some very fundamental truths were no longer to be taken for granted.
Clemson was no longer inevitable, a dynasty in visible decline. Duke was not only back, but maybe even better than before. And the ACC, in this first season without divisions, was well and truly up for grabs.
Never miss a Luke DeCock column. Sign up at tinyurl.com/lukeslatest to have them delivered directly to your email inbox as soon as they post.
Luke DeCock’s Latest: Never miss a column on the Canes, ACC or other Triangle sports
This story was originally published September 4, 2023 at 11:50 PM with the headline "Spectacular Duke upends pedestrian Clemson — and the ACC as we know it — in wild upset."
