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ATLANTIC COAST CONFERENCE MEDIA CONFERENCE

September 21, 2011

David Cutcliffe

MIKE FINN: We now welcome Duke head football coach David Cutcliffe. We'll ask for a brief opening statement, then go to questions.
Coach.
COACH CUTCLIFFE: Playing a Tulane team that is very veteran. Not surprising, it's one of the better Tulane teams in years. They went to Birmingham last week on the road and dismantled UAB. We talked to the coaches there and they were surprised at the speed, balance of their team. They've grown up. Experienced quarterback, experienced offensive front, receivers, tight ends. On the defensive side a very experienced defensive front. A lot of speed in the secondary. Very difficult matchup for us. We're excited about it. Excited about being back home playing.
We did play better last week. Sean Renfree had a big game. We have to stay on that track, get off to a fast start on this one and pick up where we left off.
With that, I'll take questions.

Q. Coach, we don't normally cover ACC schools in New Orleans. When you were at Ole Miss, a lot of your coaches had the same problem in your league. What are the positives of coaching at a school where basketball is so big and do you use that as a positive in recruiting, the name of the school? What things do you do to make that into a positive?
COACH CUTCLIFFE: It's absolutely a positive for us because we do nationally recruit. It doesn't matter whether we're in New York or California or New Orleans for that matter. The 'Duke' brand is really well-known certainly because of basketball and its academic stature.
I love the fact that our basketball team is on television just about every time they play. Young men are seeing Duke, Duke, Duke.
What we're doing, and it's pretty simple to tell youngsters, and they understand this, what we've been charged with doing here is to bring Duke football to a level that Duke basketball plays nationally. That's our challenge. That's what we intend to do.

Q. Is this similar to how you turned the Ole Miss program around?
COACH CUTCLIFFE: We were in a little better shape to start with at Ole Miss, obviously. This program, the eight previous years to us getting here, had won 10 games. I guess 24 or something like that ACC losses in a row. We kind of hit rock bottom.
But it is a similar circumstance. We have great help and support here. We've been able to put a lot of that same staff back together. We've got an opportunity. We're chipping away at it pretty quickly. Hopefully we can get to a point where we're playing possibly as good as we can. This team is physically pretty good, we're just not playing quite at the level we thought we might.
We better this week, because as you've seen already, Tulane is a very experienced football team and they're playing well for the most part.

Q. Coach Cutcliffe, I'm working on a story on Nick Saban's defense. You saw a lot of it at Tennessee and now at Duke. If you throw out the talent level of Alabama, look at X's and O's only, can you give me an idea why his defensive schemes are difficult to deal with?
COACH CUTCLIFFE: We matched up against each other when I was at Ole Miss and he was at LSU, so we go way back. Had some great matchups through the years.
Nick just gets it. He understands what causes problems to offenses. I'm supposed to know what causes problems to defenses. Sometimes we feel like we do, sometimes we don't. But we both need players to execute the schemes.
Nick does a great job of calculating pressures and beating protections. The other part of it is there's no magic in the scheme. He knows how to coach. You have to be able to get it done at practice. His guys are going to be physically and mentally prepared. They don't make a lot of mistakes. You just can't win at this level if your squad is going to make a bunch of mistakes. They don't make mistakes defensively and don't give you anything.

Q. He sits in his nickel defense with five DBs about 80% of the time, yet he's able to stop the run very well. Is a big key to it that he can stop the run and play five DBs almost all the time?
COACH CUTCLIFFE: Yes. Again, you have good people up front, and that helps. That's what we do. Defensively we're the same way. We're maybe a little bit more maybe like 90%. But he'll match up with your personnel. So many people are three-wide receivers. He utilizes the three DBs. The nickel and the safeties fit the run extremely well. That's another reason they can stop the run. Watch the DBs and they'll certainly see a lot of this versus those folks from Arkansas. Those safeties will play a big part in that, edge pressure and fitting inside.

Q. With two new teams joining the ACC, they're going to have to reexamine the divisional structure. Would you like to see all four North Carolina teams in the same division?
COACH CUTCLIFFE: I think that would be fun for all of us. Economically it makes a lot of sense for us to be able to play. We play Wake every year. For us to be able to play NC State every year would make a lot of sense to me.
I don't know how they're going to work it out and I'm sure there's problems that I'm not aware of.

Q. What were you most encouraged by with the performance against Boston College?
COACH CUTCLIFFE: The second half. We got better as the game went on. We came out in the third and fourth quarter and really dominated the game. It's the first time we've really played well, like I hope we would, in the second half for 30 minutes. Didn't start quite as quickly as I would have hoped. But certainly played by far one of the finest halves, even though it was a one-point victory, we didn't get the points on the board, but we truly dominated play in the second half, and it was good to see.

Q. You lost your first game on a field goal from 28 yards late in the game. Last week you won when the other guy's field goal went wide. As a coach, do you feel eventually things like that even themselves out?
COACH CUTCLIFFE: I'm a big believer in that. A lot of those things, official's calls that go against you, I try not to get crazy either way. We won the ballgame. We did dominate the second half, still put ourselves in position where we probably should have lost. The Richmond game, we out-gained Richmond, did everything we had to do, set our guy up who is a great kicker dead in front of the goalpost, and he misses.
It's kind of what I told them up there in Boston. That tipping thing, triumph and disaster, if you treat both of those impostors the same, you have to learn to keep an even keel, coach them hard, be the best you can be one week at a time.
MIKE FINN: Coach, thank you for being with us. Good luck this weekend. We'll talk to you next weekend.
COACH CUTCLIFFE: Thank you.

FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports

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