It used to be, back when the ACC was really the Atlantic Coast Conference, the Duke Carolina game would be one of the last games of the season; however, since the conference has added Cal, Stanford, SMU, the Sorbonne and the University of Moscow, that has thrown the usual schedules out of whack, which is why, on Saturday, Sept. 30, Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill found themselves battling it out early in the season.

The game was a thriller, with Duke overcoming a 20 to 0 lead held by the Tar Heels to win by a single point in the final minutes of the game and then closing the door on the heels by intercepting a rushed throw by the Tar Heel quarterback as the final seconds of the game ticked away.

That left Duke, surprisingly, with a record of 5-0 at the start of the season and the Tar Heels, equally surprising, at 3-2. The total and utter collapse of UNC after taking a 20-point lead in the game was interesting in itself, but there were a whole lot of extra fascinating implications and subplots to the game…

  • It may mean this is Mack Brown’s last season coaching the Tar Heels. If there is anything to the online rants of just about all of the UNC Tar Heel commentators, this will be Brown’s last season. The loss to rival Duke, in a very embarrassing manner, was bad enough. But it came on the heels of a UNC loss in which little James Madison University scored not 40, not 50, not even 60, but 70 points on Carolina one week earlier, which many UNC fans called the worst loss in the history of Carolina football.  Brown has had some great years in the past with the Tar Heels, but the current state of play of the team has many fans saying that, at the age of 73, the game has passed him by. A great many UNC fans expressed that view on YouTube and social media sites after the loss to Duke.
  • Winning Duke football may be here to stay. Duke has been used to winning in basketball over the decades, but, when it comes to football – well, not so much. Football genius Steve Spurrier brought winning football to Duke in the late 80s for a couple of years, and, last year, Mike Elko, perhaps the best up-and-coming football coach in the country, did the same before leaving the program – as did star Quarterback Riley Leonard, who left Duke for Notre Dame and will no doubt go on to play in the NFL.  However, despite the loss of those two massive talents, the team hasn’t lost a beat – or a game – at least not so far this year.
  • Duke Coach Manny Diaz gets his revenge. Diaz has a history with Mac Brown. In 2013, Brown fired Diaz as his defensive coach, two games into the season, after Diaz had held that position for two years. Diaz went on to coach at other schools, which played three times against Brown – and Diaz’s team lost each time. So, this weekend, it turned out that it was the fourth time that was a charm.
  • Duke finally gets the Mack Brown monkey off its back. Before the game this weekend, Duke had lost five straight games to Brown since he returned to coaching the Tar Heels, and, in all, Duke had a 13-game losing streak to UNC teams coached by Brown going back to 1990.In 1989, a Steve Spurrier-coached Duke team beat Carolina 41 to 0 and intentionally ran up the score on the Brown-coached team late in the game.  The Duke players came out of the locker room, went back onto the field at Carolina’s Kenan Stadium, and posed with the Victory Bell for a now-famous joyous team photo in front of the scoreboard. The following day, Brown called the move “classless” and then went on to beat Duke every time he coached against them – until Saturday, Sept. 30, 2024.

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