DURHAM, N.C. — On a beautiful North Carolina campus, an ACC school is heavily investing in trying to elevate its football program.
No, we aren’t talking about UNC’s grand Bill Belichick experiment. Go 10 miles down Tobacco Road and you’ll find a Duke football program coming off a surprising 9-4 record a year ago and dreaming of something more in the future.
A program that didn’t even have a 100-yard practice field when David Cutcliffe took over in 2008, Duke is now all-in on football in a way it never has before.
The flashpoint this offseason was landing Tulane quarterback Darian Mensah on a record-setting deal believed to be worth $8 million over two years. A big swing for basketball wouldn’t have raised an eyebrow, but Duke football paying top-of-the-market value shocked the college football world. To put it in context: That number would put a college QB above or equal to the compensation nine Power Four head coaches made in 2024. That Duke nudged out starting quarterback Maalik Murphy — who ended up at Oregon State — to bring in Mensah only added to the intrigue.
Coming off a strong 2024 season, this offseason was the Blue Devils showing the world they were “going for it,” says Duke athletic director Nina King.
Highest-paid player in college football history? Transfer QB Darian Mensah’s Duke deal is sign of times
John Talty
“We’ve got this men’s basketball program that is absolutely elite, top of the top in the brand,” King told CBS Sports. “But why can’t football be right there with men’s basketball? We’re here, we want to compete.”
King says Duke wants to be a College Football Playoff-caliber team and believes it can be. “It’s not title-or-bust, but can we play at that level?” King asks. “Absolutely, I think we can get there.”
Duke can go a long way in proving it belongs with a win Saturday over No. 11 Illinois inside Wallace Wade Stadium. With a lighter ACC schedule that sees Duke avoid Miami, SMU and Louisville, Illinois represents one of its biggest — and only — chances to prove it belongs on the national stage.
Sitting across from Manny Diaz inside his office, it is easy to see why he’s a dynamic recruiter and leader. There’s the natural charisma, of course, but also an optimism that many of his peers seem to be missing in this current transformational period of college athletics. On this day there’s no complaining about NIL, transfer portal or any other litany of things that frustrate college coaches.
Perhaps it is because Diaz believes Duke can be a big winner when all is said and done.
Diaz has been everywhere in college football, from previous stops in the ACC (Miami, Florida State and NC State) to the Big Ten (Penn State) to the then-Big 12 (Texas) to the SEC (Mississippi State) and even the Group of Six level (Middle Tennessee). He knows what worked in the pre-NIL world and sees how the game is moving with revenue sharing beginning this summer.
There’s a shift afoot, Diaz believes, and Duke will benefit.
It already has.
Duke signed four four-stars in its most recent recruiting class, led by the school’s highest-ranked signee ever, Bryce Davis. The 6-foot-3, 260-pound edge rusher probably wouldn’t have gone to Duke in the past — he was even committed to Clemson at one point — but Duke thinks it is selling something very few, if any other program, can offer with a top-ranked academic university that also (now) cares about football. U.S. News ranked Duke as the No. 6 university in the country in its 2025 rankings.
“We’re in a different era now, and kids are making choices that they just didn’t make 10 years ago,” Diaz told CBS Sports. “And that’s going to disrupt this game, and I think in a good way, by the way. I think it’s going to be super exciting. I think it already is and way less predictable than it’s been.”
There are inherent challenges that come with recruiting to a school that cares as much about academics as Duke does. The pool of players to recruit from is significantly smaller than what some of its competitors have access to. “It begins and ends with the transcript,” said Duke general manager John Garrett.
The silver lining is it brings clarity. There shouldn’t be analysis paralysis with a limited pool of options. When Stanford had things humming under Jim Harbaugh and David Shaw, it capitalized on a similar challenge. Stanford’s run was in the pre-playoff era, but the Cardinal would have made multiple trips in the 2010-16 run that included five top 10 finishes. It’s a blueprint, of sorts, on what’s capable when everything is aligned and the program starts attracting a specific type of player capable of flourishing in that environment.
Duke partnered with Big League Advantage (BLA), an analytics firm, to help identify players that fit its preferred player makeup. Garrett and his team met once a week with BLA in the fall to compare how Duke’s scouting ratings compared with the analytics on the players. Collaboratively, they came up with a list of targets.
“There’s an exact type of kid that we’re looking for,” said Duke offensive coordinator Jonathan Brewer. “We don’t have to recruit everybody. We’re looking for people that are achieving excellence in academics and want excellence in football. We don’t have to sacrifice for anything — our guys want to do both.”
Rick Lyster had finally hit the big time.
After playing football at Lafayette, Lyster slowly worked his way up the ranks, from FCS Monmouth as a volunteer defensive assistant to stops at graduate assistant and quality control gigs at Army and Georgia Tech to his first on-field coaching job at Fordham during the pandemic-impacted 2020 season.
Manny Diaz wanted him to come down to Miami, and Lyster was on his way from the Bronx to Coral Gables as the Hurricanes’ defensive quality control analyst. He fell in love with Diaz’s preferred aggressive defensive style, believing this is what football was supposed to be. The jump from school to school had been worth it; he had found the defensive mind from which he was meant to learn.
And then it all went off the rails as Miami administrators and boosters worked behind the scenes to bring Mario Cristobal back to Miami despite Diaz still holding the job. It was awkward and messy as Miami left Diaz, a native son, twisting in the wind before finally firing him when Cristobal agreed to take the job.
It would be easy for Diaz to be bitter about the experience. Perhaps he hadn’t succeeded in the way he or others hoped, but he still had a winning record and would have benefited from Miami’s aggressive NIL spending spree.
He landed at Penn State as defensive coordinator and brought Lyster with him as a defensive analyst. The pair spent a lot of time together in meeting rooms going over defensive game planning, and one day Diaz told him, “You can learn a lot from being fired if you just listen.”
“That firing changed him,” said Lyster, now Duke’s safeties coach. “It changed who he was as a man, as a coach. He realized don’t be upset about the situation, learn from it.”
Diaz has taken those lessons to Durham where he is trying to build a sustainable program that can compete in the ACC. Duke had a fork-in-the-road moment, he says, when Mike Elko left for Texas A&M. Elko went 16-9 over two seasons and made two bowl appearances, Duke’s first since 2018. Duke had been here before with the height of the Cutcliffe era delivering three consecutive eight or more win seasons — the Blue Devils even won 10 games in 2013 — but didn’t add enough coal to keep the train moving at full speed.
King, who took over as AD in 2021, didn’t want to let this moment pass Duke by again.
“I think we got a little comfortable,” King said. “I think we saw success, but we didn’t continue investing in success. I want to give credit where credit is due — what David did here was absolutely incredible.”
Duke has to be creative in how it does so. It doesn’t have a 100,000-seat football stadium delivering tens of millions in ticket sales revenue. Wallace Wade Stadium can fit 40,004 with the largest crowd last season coming against North Carolina (35,018). Duke football made about as much in total in 2023 — $39.7 million according to its EADA report — as Alabama did off football ticket revenue ($37.9 million).
Duke has great brand and marketing partnerships which help, but it has also pushed a donor base that has traditionally focused more on basketball spending to recognize the moment football has in front of it. King said that message has resonated with Duke boosters and that the support has been “incredible” from an investment and even fan attendance standpoint. Duke fans, King says, realize what football can do not only for the athletic department, but the university as a whole.
Diaz agrees.
“Everyone understands that it’s a good time to be good at football with what’s going on with all the uncertainty in college sports,” the Duke head coach said.
That is a key point to where college athletics stands right now. It’s a similar situation at schools like Indiana, Kansas and, yes, in-state rival UNC — traditional basketball blue bloods who have realized they have to spend bigger in football. With an estimated 75 to 80 % of TV rights deals coming from college football, if you want to secure a spot in the big leagues of college football, especially if there is a long-discussed consolidation into a breakaway league, one must be competent in football.
Duke has long had its doubters.
In a previous interview with SMU AD Damon Evans, then with Maryland, for “The Price: What It Takes to Win in College Football’s Era of Chaos,” the AD explained why the Terrapins, another basketball-first school, needed to make football the priority.
“What drives conference realignment? TV partners, football and marketplace,” Evans said. “You might not like it. No disrespect to Duke, ain’t nobody talking about adding Duke. It’s about football.”
Diaz and his staff are working to change that. Last season’s 9-4 record announced that there wouldn’t be a drop off after Elko left and that Duke was trending upward. The hardest part is what Duke is trying to do next. Diaz told his team that going from nine to 10 wins is more challenging than it would be to go from two to 10. Every win number Duke tries to go up, he told them, “the climb gets steeper and steeper.”
It’s ultimately the reason why Duke made such a big bet on Mensah, who threw for 2,723 yards and 22 touchdowns last season for Tulane. A Duke brain trust of Diaz, Brewer and Garrett realized that the Devils had to improve on those fine margins, and getting a quarterback like Mensah could be the difference.
“When we evaluated ourselves and some of the things that were missing in our offense, (Darian was) pretty cool character for a (redshirt) freshman in terms of his pocket awareness, his ability to manufacture time with his feet, scramble to throw, scramble to run when necessary,” Diaz said. “Those types of plays on third-and-6 when nobody’s open; it’s what made Cam Ward amazing last year. You don’t have to be perfect as a play caller because there’s the play that you call and there’s the play that the quarterback can make.
“We just felt like that was an element to our offense that Darian could do.”
Mensah threw for 389 yards and three touchdowns in Duke’s season-opening win over Elon that started shaky before ending easy. Next up is Illinois, which is also trying to take the leap to the next level after a 10-3 record in 2024. From there is a spicy return trip for Mensah to New Orleans to play his former school.
It’s a critical stretch for a program ready and eager to take that next step. Duke has invested like never before in its football program, and it’ll find out Saturday afternoon whether it is on the right path.
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