Duke's David Cutcliffe: We Can Still Win a Lot of Games
David Cutcliffe remained positive with his team following the 31-20 loss to NC State on Saturday.
“The first thing I’ll do is tell you what I told our players in the locker room after the game,” he said. “I’ll tell you what I saw. I saw every position on our team fight and fight and fight. Obviously, we were not perfect by any means. That’s my job, to get us to that point. Their job is to compete, to never go away, every series, everybody doing everything they possibly could to try to win the game on every play, and I saw that. When you have a team doing that, you have a really good football team.”
Despite a 1-5 start to the season, Cutcliffe was optimistic for the future.
“We played a really good team in NC State,” he said. “They are a good looking football team. They’re going to win a lot of games. I think, at this point, we can still win a lot of games.”
One of the biggest issues Cutcliffe identified was performance on third downs. Duke’s offense converted just four of 16 third downs in the loss, while, on defense, Duke allowed NC State to convert seven of 15 third down plays.
That was an area where Duke dominated in the win over Syracuse, converting 12 of 17 third downs and holding Syracuse to two of 12 on third down.
“What we have to do is we’ve got to play better on third down,” Cutcliffe said. “We lost on both sides of the ball there. We did that really well at Syracuse, but we’ve struggled with it all year, offensively.”
