Duke Football Declares Mike Elko 'Coach of the Year'

If nothing else, Duke football's Mike Elko warrants a monumental extension.

With a 34-31 win over the Wake Forest Demon Deacons (7-5, 3-5 ACC) at Wallace Wade Stadium on Saturday, the Duke football team (8-4, 5-3 ACC) finished with at least five conference wins for the first time since 2014 and only the third time this century.

And the Blue Devils had not beaten the Demon Deacons anywhere since 2017 and not at home since 2014.

Following the victory over Wake Forest, whose head coach, Dave Clawson, was the 2021 ACC Coach of the Year, Duke's official Twitter account declared first-year head coach Mike Elko as "Coach of the Year."

The tweet did not specify whether Elko, the defensive coordinator under Clawson from 2016 to 2018, deserves the ACC and national awards. But it seems he would be an excellent choice for both.

After all, the squad attained bowl eligibility in early November, marking the first time the program will be bowling since 2018 (bowl announcements come out next Sunday).

Furthermore, the media projected the Blue Devils to finish dead last in the seven-deep ACC Coastal Division. And they finished second.

Had they not lost the heartbreaker at home to the eventual Coastal champion UNC Tar Heels in mid-October — and everything else played out as it did — they would be heading to the ACC Championship Game in Charlotte on Saturday.

And none of Duke's four losses this season were by more than eight points; three, including the loss to UNC, were by a field goal or less. In other words, the Blue Devils had a realistic shot at winning every game they played, which conceivably would have at least put them in the College Football Playoff discussion right about now.

Incredible.

Elko credits the players.

"Listen, when you take over, and you look at the results, and you look at where the program is and the record and all of that stuff, you certainly don't imagine that it's going to flip to 8-4," the 45-year-old Mike Elko said in his press conference after his squad once again showed its resiliency by flipping the script on Wake Forest late in the game. "But when you take over the job, you don't know the character of the locker room.

"I think very quickly, we learned that there is a lot of character in this locker room. There is a lot of fight in this locker room. There are a lot of kids down there that have a lot of pride in Duke football and making Duke football special again."

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