Mike Elko Has the Blue Devils Humming—but Can Duke Keep Him in Durham?

He’s rehabilitated Duke football and has the Blue Devils primed for a surprisingly big ACC tilt in Louisville on Saturday. But that’s also made the second-year coach a hot commodity around college football—especially as Jimbo Fisher struggles at Texas A&M.

The first meeting between Nina King and Mike Elko came via a Zoom call in early December 2021. Elko was in Tampa recruiting, still the defensive coordinator at Texas A&M. King was sitting at a side table in her athletic director office at Duke, going through a round of early interviews.

Elko appeared on the screen wearing a button-down shirt. He’d gone shopping for one in Tampa before the call, a sartorial departure for a guy who prefers to live life in sweats. It was a small sign that he was serious about wanting the Duke job.

Elko has led Duke to a 14–6 record over his two seasons in Durham and has the Blue Devils at 5–2 entering Saturday’s matchup with Louisville.  :: James Guillory/USA TODAY Sports

This was a welcome sight for King, who had just risen to her own position seven months earlier. She had Elko on her primary list of candidates to replace David Cutcliffe, who amassed a 77–97 record over 14 seasons in Durham, and so did Parker Executive Search, the firm that was hired to assist the school. But she wasn’t sure Elko was as serious about the Blue Devils as they were about him—he was making $2.1 million at A&M, a school that aspired to win big and spared no expense when it came to football.

Duke? Not so much.

“He knew about our lack of investment and he still wanted to talk to us,” King says. Her job was to convince Elko that the level of football commitment was going to increase at a school that had always cared more about basketball.

King pitched. Elko bought in. The Zoom call was followed by an in-person meeting, then a series of phone calls to finalize details. On Dec. 13, 2021, Elko was introduced as Duke’s new coach.

Less than two years later, Duke is 14–6 in his tenure. That’s the best record through 20 games for any Blue Devils coach since Eddie Cameron—namesake of the school’s famed basketball arena—started 14-5-1 from 1942 to ’44.

Elko’s nine wins in 2022 were the most in school history for a first-year coach, earning him Atlantic Coast Conference Coach of the Year honors. This year Duke began September by beating ACC kingpin Clemson by three touchdowns, then finished the month with ESPN’s College GameDay show on campus for the Notre Dame game. Hosting the basketball version of GameDay is a ho-hum annual occurrence; in football, it was validation of a fresh national relevance. Student attendance records have been set three times this season alone.

“I knew he could do it,” King says. “This fast? Whew!”

The change in trajectory has happened so rapidly that, inevitably, other schools have taken a shine to Elko. There are two open FBS jobs at the moment, Michigan State and Northwestern, and both schools have him on their radars (Michigan State more realistically). Then there is the increasing turbulence at Elko’s previous employer, Texas A&M.

Jimbo Fisher is 4–3 in Year 6, 2–2 in the Southeastern Conference, not earning his massive paycheck but also backed by a massive buyout. Sources tell Sports Illustrated that if this season continues to go poorly and A&M wants to make a change, the money could be gathered to fund a staggering, $77 million payoff and send Fisher packing. It would go down as the most expensive firing in college sports history. It also would establish Elko as a candidate of prime interest.

Before Duke (5–2) plays Louisville (6–1) Saturday at 3:30 ET in an unexpectedly big ACC game, Texas A&M will host South Carolina at noon. If that goes badly for the Aggies, Fisher’s fate may be sealed. Nina King likely will be keeping an eye on the scores coming out of College Station, this week and into November.

She restructured Elko’s contract in July, extending him through 2029, with additional money for assistant coaches and support staff. If A&M comes calling, there might need to be another contract enhancement.

But more importantly than paying Nick Saban money to a guy with a sweatsuit ethos will be continuing the upgrades in other areas associated with building a football winner. If competing against a school that will spend like no one else to accommodate a football coach, Duke will have to go into the hurry-up offense of program building.

Duke ran past Clemson 28–7 in its first game of the season, a landmark win for Elko and the program :: David Jensen/Icon Sportswire/Getty Images

“Very happy here, very happy to continue to try to build this thing to be the very best it can be,” Elko said, sitting on a bright white couch in his office this week. “As long as I feel the people around here are still committed to doing it the way I believe it needs to be done, this is a great place.

“I want to win at the highest level and I do believe we can win at a really high level here, as long as we’re willing to move. That’s what I want. I’ve heard this statement made on a handful of occasions: ‘You can win six or seven games at Duke and people won’t bother you.’ I’m not wired like that in any way, shape or form. There’s nothing about me that shies away from expectations or big stages. I believe we can build a really cool program and have our handprints all over it. As long as I still believe that, this is a really good spot.”

Frequent use of “as long as” in the above sentences injects an element of intrigue. This is how winning coaches talk come Carousel Season—never box yourself in, walk the line between sounding committed and maintaining leverage—while agents and administrators speak more candidly behind closed doors.

In the caste system of college football, schools with 100,000-seat stadiums (like Texas A&M) tend to take what they want from schools with 40,000-seat stadiums (like Duke). But Elko, who played and coached at Penn and spent a year working at Notre Dame and several years at Wake Forest, could also be the guy who envisions Duke doing on Tobacco Road what Notre Dame has done forever in the Midwest, what Stanford has done for stretches of time in the Bay Area, what Northwestern has accomplished for blips of time in Chicago.

Chasing that academic-athletic sweet spot is tricky. Vanderbilt has almost never found it, in part because of conference affiliation, and Duke’s own history is at best spotty. Steve Spurrier was the last coach to leave Duke with a winning record, on his way to Florida in 1990. Everyone else between him and Elko was fired. Elko is, for the moment, embracing what Duke has to offer recruits.

Among the messages on the newly remodeled first two floors of the Duke football building—the locker room is next on the upgrade list, then endowing coaching positions and scholarships—is a wall that reads, “Best of both worlds.” Beneath that lettering are the program’s graduation rate, number of NFL draft picks, number of football All-Americans and number of academic All-Americans. The sell here is less about quick-strike NIL riches than combining the lifelong power of a Duke degree with the opportunity to simultaneously chase pro dreams.

There are current players who are maximizing the Duke experience, mature fifth-year guys who went through three straight losing seasons at the end of the Cutcliffe era and have emerged as winners under Elko. Not that the transition period was easy.

Center Jacob Monk remembers an introductory phone conversation with Elko shortly after he got the job.

“Do you love football?” Elko asked him.

“Yes, sir,” was Monk’s response.

“We’ll see how much everyone loves football,” Elko said, presaging the intensity upgrade to come.

He might have an Ivy League degree, but Elko, a native of South Brunswick, N.J., is rooted in the value of unstinting effort and unpretentious attitude. He is a meat-and-potatoes ball coach, and Duke needed itself one of those.

The first hire Elko made upon arrival was David Feeley as his director of performance, which is a better way of saying he was the strength and conditioning coach. They are invariably the tone setters—culture builders, in the current nomenclature—and they are especially crucial amid a coaching change. Ask players about Feeley’s first winter workout in January 2022, and they still recoil.

“It was awful,” says Monk.

“It wasn’t a joke,” says defensive tackle DeWayne Carter, the first three-time captain in Duke football history. “We were in the weight room for a total of five minutes.”

Leonard has emerged as a star under Elko, amassing nearly 5,000 yards of total offense over 19 starts :: David Butler II/USA TODAY Sports

When the Blue Devils struggled with the lifts and techniques Feeley was teaching, the response was to go into the adjacent indoor workout area for up-downs—the act of throwing your body on the ground and then jumping to your feet and running in place. Carter estimates they did this 70 or 80 times that first day. Coaches love the folklore about players throwing up in trash cans during winter workouts—in this case, it was not folklore.

“We came out of there thinking, ‘Oh, it just got real,’” Carter says.

But here’s what else came out of that first brutal winter—a large collective buy-in. Elko kept the core of the team together for a variety of reasons.

Carter had promised his parents he would get a Duke degree. Monk, a North Carolina native, was the son of a Duke player who had been coming to the campus to watch games nearly his entire life. Others were energized by the new regime and the chance to make good on unfulfilled potential.

Sacrifices were required, and were made. Among the most notable: Jordan Moore was a quarterback as a freshman but was moved to receiver—he stuck it out and has caught 87 passes over two seasons, becoming a vital leader in the process. Moore’s move made room for Riley Leonard to become a star at the position, producing nearly 5,000 yards of total offense across 19 starts.

The most striking change in Duke football under Elko has been the physical toughness of the team. The ability to run the ball and stop the run are good measuring sticks, and the Blue Devils have been reborn in those areas. They lead the ACC in yards per rush attempt this season at 5.62, which might not be unprecedented in school history but certainly is rare.

When Duke pounded out three second-half scoring drives to pull away from Clemson, it was a master class in a team exerting its will on an opponent. Those three touchdown drives consisted of 12 runs and three passes.

That got the Blue Devils off to a 4–0 start, which in turn brought GameDay to campus for the game against Notre Dame. Duke battled back from a 13–0 deficit and had the game all but won, up 14–13, before Fighting Irish quarterback Sam Hartman led a last-minute scoring drive that he saved with a fourth-and-16 scramble. The play still haunts the Blue Devils, but the fact that they should have beaten Notre Dame was another program milestone.

So, too, was last Saturday, when Duke led undefeated Florida State in the fourth quarter before relenting. Leonard’s reinjuring his ankle—which he initially hurt at the end of the Notre Dame loss—with the Devils up 20–17 and driving late in the third quarter lingers as a what-if as well, but the larger reality is this: Duke has led in the fourth quarter of every game this season.

“That hasn’t really been the recipe for Duke football,” Elko says with a laugh.

Nina King wants to keep that recipe in her kitchen, not someone else’s. Her approach to having a coach who will be in demand on the open market?

“Hands off,” she says, laughing. “I’m glad other people are excited about his coaching ability, but we intend to keep him at Duke for a long time. He tells me what he needs and I tell him what we can do, and we’ll continue to work on building that program. It’s no secret: Football needs to be good.”