Dino Babers Prepares for Legendary Coach David Cutcliffe
SYRACUSE, NY — Syracuse is 1-2 through the first four weeks of the season. The Duke Blue Devils are 0-4. The Orange defense leads the nation with seven passes intercepted. The Duke offense ranks last with 15 turnovers. Syracuse beat Duke 49-6 last year in Durham, North Carolina. This Saturday in the Carrier Dome, the visiting, winless Duke Blue Devils are favored to beat Syracuse by 1.5 points.
Betting odds don’t mean much to football coaches, but this one had to sting just a little when Syracuse head coach Dino Babers happened upon it as part of his voracious reading regimen.
“We haven't been favored in an entire football game this year. And, you know, that's okay,” Babers said on Monday, seemingly at peace with the apparent disrespect. “We need to get better. Everybody is telling us that we need to get better. And we're working really, really hard to get better as fast as we can.”
In many cases, players will adopt the mentality and philosophy of their head coach. Syracuse players are no exception. Orange corner back Garrett Williams says that having little expected of his team has come to be expected.
“We try not to focus on that because we were underdogs against Georgia Tech last week as well,” Williams said during player press availability Tuesday night. “We just we just focus on our scouting reports and practicing hard and we know if we do those things right, we'll have a good chance of winning the game on Saturday."
Perhaps the reason no insult was taken by Babers and his team is because of their immense regard for the man captaining Duke’s 0-4 struggle. Less than halfway through his 13th season at Duke, Blue Devils head coach David Cutcliffe is not used to seeing a “0” in the win column. Six of the past eight seasons have ended in bowl games for Duke, three of them being wins. Before Cutcliffe took charge in Durham in 2008, Duke had not appeared in a postseason bowl game since 1994 and had not hoisted a bowl trophy since 1960.
“Coach Cutcliffe's an amazing coach, he really is,” Babers said of his peer and adversary. “He's gone around. He's been around a long time. He's coached some of the best players. Not only in college, but in the National Football League.“
As a quarterbacks coach for Tennessee and then later as the top dog at Ole Miss, Cutcliffe had the chance to develop two future Super Bowl MVPs in brothers Peyton and Eli Manning. Most recently, Cutcliffe is credited for the ascent of 2019 sixth overall NFL Draft pick Daniel Jones.
Prior to last week’s one-score loss to Virginia Tech, Duke had lost each of its first three games by 14-points or more. The 38-31 loss to the Hokies at home also marked the first time all year Duke had scored in the fourth quarter, scratching across 17 in the final frame. Babers believes the narrow defeat could have been the turning point in what has been Duke’s worst start since 2006.
“You can see that David Cutcliffe has gotten a lot more involved with things that are going on,” Babers said. “That looked like an almost entirely different football team. And they gave a heck of a fight Saturday. I really believe that Coach Cutcliffe is one of the sharpest guys I've ever met in coaching. And I know that he's going to right that ship. And that is not the guy you want to be going against when when it looks like things are going bad and he's rallying the troops.”
Another area of Blue Devil improvement was seen in the turnover department. During their first three outings of 2020, the Duke offense was averaging almost five turnovers a game. Last week against Virginia Tech, they turned it over only once. Babers identifies with that kind of offensive hardship and likened it to the biggest obstacle Orange quarterbacks have faced over the past couple of seasons.
“I kind of look at it the way I look at our sacks,” Babers said of Duke’s propensity for giveaways. “I mean, we were averaging seven sacks a game and then the last game we had one. And it's just a matter of putting a major, major emphasis on it. And you're going to try like the dickens not to let this thing happen to you again. He (Cutcliffe) is not going to allow that to continuously happen, especially with him being an offensive guy. So I expect that to be cured and I expect to be playing a Duke football team that's not going to be turning the ball over a bunch.”
While Duke has yet to win a game, they appear to be improving. So which coach has the upper-hand: Babers or Cutcliffe? Fresh off their bye week, Babers says it will come down to a matter of rest or rust for the Orange.
“They have a huge advantage because they played a game last week,” Babers said as part of his pregame evaluation. “And that normally means that they have an opportunity to start a little bit faster than us. We're going to have an advantage because we're going to have some guys healthy, supposedly. And hopefully, we can catch up to game speed fast enough that we don't get too far behind where we can make a game of it.”
Orange wide receiver Nykeim Johnson, who already has more receiving yards in three games this year (112) than he had in all of last year (99), says momentum hasn’t been interrupted by the week off.
“You don't have to worry about that,” Johnson said Tuesday. “I mean, you got to keep it up with the practice schedule. We practice at least five days a week. It was good kind of getting in there and getting out. That's going to keep us going for the next few weeks.”
Johnson’s head coach refused to feel guilty about the blank space on the game schedule.
“I’m not going to apologize for the week off. Now, I will say this, that we got after it a little bit (in practice) because I really don't want us to have a slow start and I don't want to jinx us either,” Babers said as he literally knocked on wood during his Zoom conference.
Last year, in Babers’ only meeting against Cutcliffe, Syracuse struck quickly with 14 points in the first quarter. The Orange never relinquished the lead on their way to a 49-6 drubbing of the Devils. Duke leads the all-time series three games to one.
