Alabama 49 Duke 17
There is a part of me that really feels sorry for David Cutcliffe. If Saban wanted to, I think he could put up fifty or sixty points on a defense that has given up over forty points each to two patsies.
David Cutcliffe is a man of principle. He wouldn't back down when Werner Alford, the Ole Miss AD (and former Johnny Vaught player), tried to tell him who he could and could not have on his staff. Now Cutcliffe has stood up to somebody at Duke and said, essentially, "We aren't going to go for the money on this one." They could have raked in an extra couple of million, I believe, if they had played the game at Charlotte, Atlanta, or Birmingham, but Cutcliffe thinks it's good for Durham if they play in a stadium that would be too small for some Texas high school games. Incidentally, how did a stadium that Wallace's Wade's name is on stay that small for well over a half-century?
Cutcliffe is one of the few people who never played college ball actually to know the game well enough to be looked up to by those who did play it. For whatever reason, Ole Miss didn't buy completely into Cutcliffe, so he temporarily went back to being second banana to Phillip Fulmer, and resumed propping up Fulmer, whose offense went South again as soon as Cutcliffe went off to Duke. Without Cutcliffe, Fulmer would most probably never have won a national championship.
Now Cutcliffe has a toehold at Duke, probably one of the few places he could have gotten a 1A head coaching job. It's a place where the Rivals front page presents Coach K's 4-star basketball recruits instead of Cutcliffe's 2-star football recruits. If you go to the Raleigh-Durham-Chapel Hill area, you will soak in the atmosphere -- it is all about tall trees, hills and valleys -- and basketball. Football is the red-headed stepchild of the area. Mack Brown went to Chapel Hill and proved his worth by turning North Carolina into somewhat of a football school. That's how he got the Texas job.
I don't want to see Cutcliffe get clobbered tomorrow, but I do want to see Alabama do its thing. We will see some offense come out of Cutcliffe's repertoire, but nobody's really taught them much defense yet, apparently. Incidentally, if Cutcliffe was a graduate assistant at Tuscaloosa in Bryant's last days there, did he pick up anything about the passing game from Bryant? Bryant was running the Wishbone, which passed about as much as Duke plays defense.
