Duke 20, Northwestern 14

[Bob Green]

Duke heads to Evanston on Saturday for a game against the Northwestern Wildcats (2-0). Kickoff is scheduled for 8 p.m. (EST). This will be Duke's first night game of the season so maybe playing under the lights will be the ticket for success. The Chicago Tribune has commentary posted on Northwestern's 2-0 start and they communicate concern over the game against Duke. In regard to Northwestern's development, the following comment is made:

Yet clearly they still are ripening, which only lends a not-uncertain sense of urgency to their game with Duke. The Blue Devils have lost 22 straight and certainly do not look like a threatening foe. Yet they are just the kind of foe that can induce indolence and result in a letdown that retards the ripening process.

Hopefully, Duke can kick start the season with a victory Saturday night!

[6th Man]

I'm with you Mr. Green. Maybe we can catch Northwestern thinking they will have a cakewalk. Maybe a victory would take the pressure off and the Devils could then settle down and just play.

[formerdukeathlete]

Scout:
2005 class - Duke, 31; Northwestern, 51
2006 class - Duke, 36; Northwestern, 71
2007 class - Duke, 64; Northwestern, 56

Rivals:
2005 class - Duke, 46; Northwestern, 52
2006 class - Duke, 56; Northwestern, 81
2007 class - Duke, 78; Northwestern, 53

Northwestern appears to be doing more with less talent.

Maybe, talent prevails this Saturday. Hopefully Roof turns it around. Nonetheless, Northwestern's coach may be worth keeping an eye on.

[throatybeard]

Nonetheless, Northwestern's coach may be worth keeping an eye on.

Why on earth would he come here? He's coaching at his alma mater and it would be a lateral move at best.

[formerdukeathlete]

Why on earth would he come here? He's coaching at his alma mater and it would be a lateral move at best.

ok, pre-lax debacle, Duke outyielded Northwestern 80% of the time, according to a 2005 article in our alumni mag which has been linked on the board before.

re football, i still believe that Duke can get together and sustain a much better football program than it has today. It has a tradition of sorts, however back-dated. It has the weather factor. It has presumably an academic reputation second to Stanford in Division 1 bowl division.

So, for the Northwestern coach, I know why we might be interested in him. Why he might be interested in us? A chance to get into the big leagues post Duke, a big job, after winning at Duke.

He calls on his contacts in the midwest. But, this time he has a slightly better school (perhaps debatable) with much better weather (not debatable) to sell. What turnaround success at Duke, with some recruiting advantages over Northwestern, might mean to his career? Some marginal utility analysis vis a vis probable outcomes - he can recruit smart kids, so he gets them, he gets better calibre, because he has some initial coaching success, and because he has something better to sell, then he translates this into Spurrier like success (making the most of what you have), he becomes a superstar and goes to the NFL. Duke gets back on the map and with a renovated Wade can land the next guy to sustain the program.

could be a win-win for both.

[Scoring Point]

- FB recruiting rankings are even less reliable than BB ones, especially when aggregated, so I doubt the above figures offer any real precision around the relative talent levels in the 2 programs

- That said, having watched both teams, I believe NU is probably a bit more talented overall and certainly more experienced

- The starkest differences between the two teams are:

* the offensive line (Northwestern's is very solid, Duke's has been a disaster so far)
* skill positions (QB, RB, WR and DB); no offensive player in the Duke program is in the same league talent-wise as Wildcat TB Tyrell Sutton (though he may not play Saturday), while QB CJ Bacher is solid and relatively mistake-free and they have good depth (though no real other stars) at WR and behind Sutton at RB
* for lack of a better term, coaching - NU has more imaginative playcalling, executes better and plays with more consistent intensity

That said, the Devils can win this game if they play well and Northwestern is off their game/doesn't bring it/is caught looking ahead, etc.

Agree with Throaty that the chance of Pat Fitzgerald leaving NU for Duke is nil.

[chrishoke]

NW gave up 31 points, 30 first downs and 527 yds offense last week at home in a win over Nevada. We should at least be able to score some points.

[Olympic Fan]

A couple of points:

-- The comparison of recruiting rankings is interesting. Okay, the gurus agree that Duke outrecruited Northwestern in 2005 and 2006 (but NW outrecruited Duke in 2007).

What about 2004 and 2003? Those are the MOST relevant classes for this year's team. Those are the fourth and fifth year players who should be at the heart of a 2007 team. How many fifth-year guys from the '03 class are playing for each team? Who had the better class in 2004 -- the redshirt juniors and seniors that are playing now?

-- Let's wait until Saturday to decide that Northwestern is doing all that much better than Duke this year. Yeah, they are 2-0 and Duke is 0-2. But their opening win came against a weak 1-AA team (I know Duke lost to Richmond last year, but there is a wide difference in the difficulty of various 1-AA foes -- Richmond was a playoff quality 1-AA; Northeastern is coming off a losing season in 1-AA). Their 36-31 victory over Nevada is better, but it is a win over a team picked to finish sixth in the WAC.

I'm not trying to put them down -- I'd rather have their 2-0 than our 0-2 any day -- I'm only saying that it's a bit to early to suggest that Northwestern is doing a lot more with its talent than Duke is.

-- The Northwestern coach Pat Fitzgerald is the youngest coach in Division 1-A -- by a wide margin. But before you start lusting after him to fill the Duke job, understand that he almost nothing to do with where Northwestern is now.

The coach who made Northwestern competitive in the Big Ten over the last decade was Randy Walker, a brilliant offensive coach, who was the first NW coach in a century to have four six-win seasons. Walker suffered a fatal heart attack just before the start of the 2006 season. Fitzgerald, a 31-year-old assistant on his staff -- and a star linebacker on Northwestern's 1995 Rose Bowl team -- was named to succeed him.

Fitzgerald went 4-8 last season (big dropoff from the seven-win season in Walker's last year). That was a team that Walker, not Fitzgerald, recruited and developed. This year's Wildcats, who were still mostly recruited and trained by Walker, are picked either 10th and 11th in most preseason Big Ten polls.

I'm just saying that the late Randy Walker would have been perfect for the Duke situation. But Pat Fitzgerald? In the first place, he's a Northwestern guy through and through and in the second, he's got a long way to go to prove he's a quality head football coach.

[Patrick Yates]

Football recruiting rankings are seriously flawed. As much as we complain about BB rankings (which have serious flaws of their own), comparing FB recruiting rankings to BB recruiting rankings is like comparing addition to quantum physics. There is some truth to the rankings, but BB is more accurate for all of its problems.

Even though the whole AAU/Summer camp scene is rife with scummy characters and questionable game quality, at least the players generally play against each other, or at least against the same players. This lets coaches, and recruitniks, truly evaluate players in a setting where they are playing with peers, both athletically and skillset wise.

FB has no such national camp. There are a few camps for specialized positions, most notably the elite 11 where the top QBs get together, but that too is flawed. The kids don't wear pads, there is no blitz, and there darn sure isn't any hitting.

Unlike BB, since the top kids might never play each other, it is really hard to get a read on a kid. Heck, some "top" players play for very small schools, or against very weak opposition. This makes rating them as players virtually impossible, much less compiling a class ranking.

For example, this year's top QB is a kid named Terelle Pryor in PA. He is 6-6 220 with a rocket arm and a scrambling ability a small noctch below Vick. In his last game he completed something like 10 of 14 passes for like 250+ yards and 4 tds in a little under 2 quarters before his coach basically instituted a mercy rule. This kid has all the tools, but he plays in a nothing league on a team that is traditionally the most talented (which isn't really a ringing endorsement apparently, kind of like being the least ugly kid). Can he do it with and against top talent, or is he simply a God-Athlete (and there is no doubt about his athleticism, as he is a top 40 BB player) surrounded by insects? He has never played against top talent, so who knows if he can adjust to college? He sure isn't getting the reps right now.

Look at Jimmy Clausen at Notre Dame. His high school sent like 10 kids to High Major Div 1 programs last year. The only kids who did not get scholarships last year were underclassmen who will soon be accepting scholly's this year. Other teams have numerous scholly level athletes, but Clausen's team played in a low level private school conference. Frequently, this Clausen team would destroy a team that fielded 0 scholarship level athletes. Obviously, the tools are there for Clausen and his teammates, but the competition at College will be entirely different.

As an addendum, when top schools play in elite conferences and against interstate elite foes, these rankings get more precise, but Duke is not exactly going to be able to mine those teams and players.

With regards to team rankings (which were never exact anyways due to red-shirts, injuries, and failures to qualify), it is an arbitrary science. Many national recruiters at least partially base their rankings on video high lights or local media reports. If there are two more arbitrary, conflict of interest riddled methods of calculating rankings, I would like to see them.

Duke, for all its BCS eligibility, is the equivalent of a mediocre Basketball mid major. In an ideal world, the staff would have time to really evaluate personally every single recruit to determine which kids would be great fits at Duke, to essentially unearth those diamonds in the rough the high majors miss. But that will never happen. Most recruits play the night before Duke plays, when the staff is preparing for our own game. Obviously, the staff does not have enough time to watch the entire game tape of every possible recurit, in order to determine if the Kid is a good fit. That much time doesn't exist.

Thus Duke has to fall back on the flawed recruiting rankings, as well as the tapes that Duke gets of kids that wish to be recruited by Duke (and many of these purely for academic reasons rather than any true desire to excell at Football). It is no way to build a class.

As for the team rankings, well, they are pointless and completely wrong. I think the rankings are tiered more than any thing. It is probably possible to get a read on which classes are the top 5-10, in any given order, and then the top 20-30 after that, again in any given order. This means that a team in this strata could easily have the 15th best class or the 30th, there is no real way to discern the difference ahead of time.

Then you have those outside the top 40 or so. They might as well do these alphabetically for all they know. The classes are usually almost entirely contrived of second tier kids who the major scouts have never personally evaluated or heard of, other than an internet or AP listing of height, weight, academic standing, and school affiliation/statsheet.

The gist of this is that Rivals has no idea if Duke or NW has a better class. Nor do they really care, sinee neither school's fans really expect to win. But, they are pay services so they dutifully rank all 116 Div 1 recruiting classes, mainly to justify their own existances.

We certainly should not put any weight behind so called rankings. Now, if a coach brings in a consensus top 30 or so class, we can pin some hopes on it. But classes below the 40 mark are a real poop-shoot. Sometimes we here on the board take recruiting rankings as gospel, mostly because we are more familiar with the BB rankings, which are more accurate. But FB is little better than queswork, especially with regards to they type of players Duke can reasonable expect to get.

Patrick Yates

[allenmurray]

Duke takes on a very inconsistant Nothwestern team Saturday Night.

The Wildcats have knocked off 5 Top 25 teams in the last 4 years
But have also fallen to 8 teams in non BCS conferences in the last 5 years

The Wildcats are a verrrry dangerous team at home

Their QB, CJ Bacher has thrown for 38 completions and 4 TD's in the first 2 games, this team is also 2-0 and a win against us would put them 3-0 heading in to Columbus, OH nect Saturday

We need to show a strong OL saturday and I will take a better game from guys like Jomar Wright, Eron Riley and Thaddeius Lewis

Hopefully we can pull out what will be a tough win vs. NW

Not really anymore winnable games this year except for maybe Nvy or UNC

Go to HELL CAROLINA!!!!

Go Devils!!!

[Scoring Point]

A couple of points:

-- The comparison of recruiting rankings is interesting. Okay, the gurus agree that Duke outrecruited Northwestern in 2005 and 2006 (but NW outrecruited Duke in 2007).

What about 2004 and 2003? Those are the MOST relevant classes for this year's team. Those are the fourth and fifth year players who should be at the heart of a 2007 team. How many fifth-year guys from the '03 class are playing for each team? Who had the better class in 2004 -- the redshirt juniors and seniors that are playing now?

-- Let's wait until Saturday to decide that Northwestern is doing all that much better than Duke this year. Yeah, they are 2-0 and Duke is 0-2. But their opening win came against a weak 1-AA team (I know Duke lost to Richmond last year, but there is a wide difference in the difficulty of various 1-AA foes -- Richmond was a playoff quality 1-AA; Northeastern is coming off a losing season in 1-AA). Their 36-31 victory over Nevada is better, but it is a win over a team picked to finish sixth in the WAC.

I'm not trying to put them down -- I'd rather have their 2-0 than our 0-2 any day -- I'm only saying that it's a bit to early to suggest that Northwestern is doing a lot more with its talent than Duke is.

-- The Northwestern coach Pat Fitzgerald is the youngest coach in Division 1-A -- by a wide margin. But before you start lusting after him to fill the Duke job, understand that he almost nothing to do with where Northwestern is now.

The coach who made Northwestern competitive in the Big Ten over the last decade was Randy Walker, a brilliant offensive coach, who was the first NW coach in a century to have four six-win seasons. Walker suffered a fatal heart attack just before the start of the 2006 season. Fitzgerald, a 31-year-old assistant on his staff -- and a star linebacker on Northwestern's 1995 Rose Bowl team -- was named to succeed him.

Fitzgerald went 4-8 last season (big dropoff from the seven-win season in Walker's last year). That was a team that Walker, not Fitzgerald, recruited and developed. This year's Wildcats, who were still mostly recruited and trained by Walker, are picked either 10th and 11th in most preseason Big Ten polls.

I'm just saying that the late Randy Walker would have been perfect for the Duke situation. But Pat Fitzgerald? In the first place, he's a Northwestern guy through and through and in the second, he's got a long way to go to prove he's a quality head football coach.

You may some fair points, and Pat Fitzgerald certainly has a lot still to prove. A couple things to pint out though:

- Fitzgerald was NW's recruiting coordinator for the 04, 05 and 06 classes

- He had shown enough potential as an assistant to have already been anointed as Randy Walker's eventual successor by Walker and AD Mark Murphy; Walker's sudden death just accelerated the timing by 6-7 years. He already has a lot of respect among his conference peers despite his youth.

Also worth noting that Fitzgerald is not just a NW guy through and through, he is also a Chicago native. The only scenarios I can see for him leaving anytime soon are:

- for another head coaching spot that is a major upgrade (i.e. one of the Big 10's "Big 4" or a similar program in a BCS caliber conference)

- he ultimately proves to be a much worse coach than expected and gets fired/resigns

The idea that he might leave Northwestern, as a successful coach, to come to Duke is beyond illogical.

[Bluedawg]

I know I'm starting this early, but I'll be at work at the start of the game tonight, and probably driving home for the end. Everyone had a good time with it last time so i figured lets go again.

My preseason prediction was 4 wins, I'm still holding on the the final 3 and may actually add ND as 4th. therefore I stand by my prediction that Duke travels to the windy city and breaks the losing streak two years to the day that it started.

Duke wins today.

[Bluedawg]

If anyone feels that Duke does not plays hard and with passion, you have never really paid attention to the games. These guys work hard.

I was talking with a friend who is a local sports reporter/anchor and i told him I feel at some point Duke will put it all together and the team they happen to be playing at that moment will feel the wrath. He agreed.

[Wander]

Does anyone know what the deal with the TV coverage is? I know it's on the Big Ten network, but what does that mean for us in the triangle?

[Bluedawg]

Does anyone know what the deal with the TV coverage is? I know it's on the Big Ten network, but what does that mean for us in the triangle?

We listen on Duke Radio Network, on CSTV or rely on kind Duke fans to post updates on this thread.

[OZZIE4DUKE]

i was talking with a friend who is a local sports reporter/anchor and i told him I feel at some point Duke will put it all together and the team they happen to be playing at that moment will feel the wrath. He agreed.

It is time for the stars to align, the bounces go our way, the bio-rythms to be right, for the calls to go in our favor and for Duke to win today's game!

[gep]

We listen on Duke Radio Network, on CSTV or rely on kind Duke fans to post updates on this thread.

I was going to ask about the Chat Room... but I just went to the link, and got a "Bad Gateway" 502 error...

[Bluedawg]

I was going to ask about the Chat Room... but I just went to the link, and got a "Bad Gateway" 502 error...

Chat room? Tell me more...

[gep]

Chat room? Tell me more...

Go to the 4th "sticky" at the top of this forum... link for "SnrubChat"... chat room started awhile back for basketball, I think...

[billybreen]

SnrubChat is back online. Sorry.