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| Peter Koutroumpis, PKS Consulting |
Will the Duke Blue Devils become bowl eligible after playing
the North Carolina Tar Heels during the two teams’ 99th meeting at
Wallace Wade Stadium on Saturday night?
Maybe. Maybe not.
The key to the Blue Devils achieving that goal will be to
continue what they have been doing all season – playing hard for 60 minutes,
with heart and with confidence.
Seems simple enough, doesn’t it.
Resetting after
Blacksburg
However, after leading Virginia Tech 20-0 at Lane Stadium during
most of the first half, the Blue Devils collapsed later in the half to allow the
Hokies to claw back and eventually shut them out during the second half and to
win the game 41-20.
It seems that the lack of a productive effort for the entire
game and some more injuries resulted in Duke dropping into a rut in Blacksburg.
Head coach David Cutcliffe stated simply during his Sunday
teleconference, “we’ve got a lot to learn still about handling adversity and a
team that gets hot on you.”
Not an advocate of forgetting about previous games,
Cutcliffe stated that he would direct his team to put the game behind them
emotionally, and to study and grow from it.
“This team doesn’t like losing,” he said.
Will they do it?
According to many outside the program, Duke has been playing
its entire season as overachievers and will run into a wall as it faces the
final half of its playing schedule with opponents like the Tar Heels.
No doubt with the Tar Heels on a four-game win streak, they
will drive up 15-501 and into Durham with a lot of confidence as well as a 58-36-4
all-time record over the Blue Devils.
The winner
of Saturday’s game will receive the coveted Victory Bell, which has been
presented annually to the winner of the Carolina-Duke football game since the
1940s.
A large
bell on wheels, Head cheerleaders from Duke (Loring Jones) and North Carolina (Norman Spear) decided on the idea, with Jones designing the model and Spear obtaining a bell from an old railroad train.
Whoever wins it from year-to-year is allowed to paint the frame of
the bell its team color.
Although Carolina
has owned the bell for 21 of the last 22 seasons, Duke has a tremendous
opportunity to break the Tar Heels’ streak, and to get back into the groove it
was in while winning four straight games itself before losing to Virginia Tech.
Should they
do it, the Blue Devils beating the Tar Heels and claiming the Victory Bell will
only be a precursor to the bigger celebration of becoming bowl-eligible with a
sixth victory on the year.
That would
provide for a great reason to ring the bell for a long time afterward.
After all, winning the Victory Bell by beating the Tar Heels and becoming bowl-eligible on the same day rarely happens at Duke.
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