By Jerry Ratcliffe
After watching his Duke team get derailed 34-17 by Virginia 15 days ago, Manny Diaz believed getting his Blue Devils to Charlotte for the ACC Championship game was just an afterthought.
Still, after Duke beat Wake Forest on Saturday, Diaz watched UVA hammer Virginia Tech, locking up a spot in Charlotte for the Cavaliers, which really muddied the waters for his Duke team.
“The whole mindset was like, ‘Nah, no way is it going to happen,” Diaz said.
That was before Cal upset favored SMU, knocking the Mustangs out of the championship game and reviving Duke.
Virginia (10-2) vs. Duke (7-5) for all the ACC marbles, which has caused national controversy and pure outrage in Miami, which is ranked No. 12 in the country and a tie-breaker loser to the Devils for a spot in Charlotte (Saturday night, 8 p.m., ABC). UVA is a 2.5-point favorite by the oddsmakers.
Despite clobbering Duke two weeks ago, the Cavaliers are less than a field-goal favorite the second time around.
Diaz, who credited Virginia for completely dominating his team in that first meeting, also said “that was by far our worst game.”
Virginia coach Tony Elliott, who was offensive coordinator at Clemson when the Tigers were regular participants in the ACC Championship game, said he remembers the time he was involved in a rematch for the title, 2011 against Virginia Tech.
“We turned around and played them in the championship game and that kind of reminds me of this situation,” Elliott said of the rematch with Duke. “You’ve got to throw out what you did in the previous game. This game is going to come down to execution and I’m sure we’re going to get Duke’s best effort. Since our game, [Duke] has gotten back into rhythm offensively and been able to score a bunch of points.”
Elliott said he will share with his team that it has to play its best four quarters in Charlotte, and have its best week of preparation.
Diaz said that he and his coaching staff had not had a chance to “re-game plan” for Virginia.
“I just told the staff that [UVA] reserves the right to make adjustments against us as well,” Diaz said. “This is an unusual thing in college. You do get it in the pros all the time, rematches. You don’t see it in college as much.”
Diaz said that he did notice fight in his team when it trailed Virginia 31-3 a couple of weeks ago, bouncing back to score two touchdowns.
“That showed there was still a backbone,” acknowledging that he and his staff had to perform some major psychological work on his team over the immediate 24 hours after getting blown out by the Cavaliers.
Diaz took exception to the national critics that said a 7-5 team doesn’t deserve to be in a conference championship game, and possibly a spot in the 12-team College Football Playoff field, should the Devils beat UVA.
“Absolutely,” Diaz said when he was asked if his team deserves its spot in Charlotte or possibly beyond.
“Records have a lot to do with schedules, right?” Diaz said. “We have five losses. We wish we’d played better in those games. We’ve lost two (games) to 10-win teams, two to 9-win teams and to an 8-win team. We’ve gone on the road. Two of our losses were one-score games on the road to a Group of 5 school, and a 9-win and a 10-win Group of 5 school. If that’s an issue, that’ll just never happen again.
“And so the whole argument of should a Group of 5 conference be in the playoff at the ACC’s expense? Well, you can forget about ever booking a home-and-home game and encouraging teams to go play good competition at home and away, because we could have just scheduled better and had nine wins. If we’d played last year’s schedule, this would be a 9-win team.”
Diaz said it’s similar to what he heard Texas coach Steve Sarkesian say about whether the Longhorns deserve a playoff spot.
“What’s the point [of Texas] playing Ohio State?” Diaz said. “If people are saying a three-loss team shouldn’t be in the playoff … let’s just all schedule wins, especially now that we’re going to nine conference games. We’ve had a schedule that challenged us, that has improved us as the year has gone on. That is absolutely worthy of being in Charlotte.”
