news-record.com

GREENSBORO -- On a hot and steamy Wednesday, in the middle of summer, Duke football re-introduced itself to North Carolina.

David Cutcliffe, the Blue Devils' new coach, stood before his toughest audience and made a promise.

"We're gonna shake this thing up," he said. "Don't think for a second we're not gonna shake this thing up."

He was speaking to the state's high school football coaches, some of whom had never laid eyes on a Duke football coach, and he knew it was a momentous occasion.

"That's the base," he said as he walked out of the auditorium at the Greensboro Coliseum, where he'd just delivered a sermon on football as a part of the North Carolina Coaches Association's annual East-West All-Star clinics. "That's our foundation."

He'd just spent the better part of two hours talking football to a rapt audience, all the coaches in the state, all dressed in their school colors and in various shades of cynicism. After all, they'd heard it before. Duke is back. Duke is going to recruit in-state. Duke is serious about football again. Blah, blah, blah.

Somehow, this was different. Cutcliffe had their attention before they even walked into the auditorium. They'd just heard Appalachian State coach Jerry Moore lecture and cajole on the nuances of his Mountaineers' spread offense, just been indoctrinated in the intricacies of the Appalachian Fake 49 Y-Slant. And now here was the quarterback coach himself, the coach of Peyton Manning and Eli Manning and Heath Shuler and Erik Ainge and Todd Helton.

He had every eye and ear in the state.

They played the annual East-West All-Star football game Wednesday night, and almost every coach in town was really here for that. But they didn't take notepads to the game. They didn't take pencils and backup pencils and their tape recorders and their assistants to make sure they had enough paper and batteries.

The high school coaches filed in and sat at attention, first for Moore, who has won three straight national titles and has everyone's attention statewide right now, even that of Cutcliffe.

"Jerry was the first to figure it out," Cutcliffe said. "He's the one who knew, before it even happened, that a pipeline of talent was going to start coming out of North Carolina, coming out of the East-West game. And he got those kids to go to App before anybody else knew what was going on."

Cutcliffe wants to model his program, in part, on the success of ASU and Wake Forest, programs that sprang from the North Carolina soil with homegrown talent to shock the rest of the nation. If he's able to do the same at Duke, it will come as a shock to many.

Marion Kirby, who organized the clinics for the coaches' association, sat back and listened to still another coach come in and talk about recruiting North Carolina kids, talk about building from within.

"It's as promising a day as I've seen of Duke football in some time," said the former Page High School and Greensboro College coach. "There's a long way to go, and it's not going to be easy. Jim Grobe's doing it at Wake Forest, and this guy's going to have as good a chance to do it at Duke. But we'll see."

Cutcliffe is recruiting the local kids hard, so hard one coach called it "turbocharged" recruiting. Duke is on the list of every top quarterback in the Southeast, if not the nation, for what he's done during previous stops at Ole Miss and Tennessee. And he knows to get to the rest of the talent, especially here in his home state, he has to go through the high school coaches.

"I've been recruiting here since 1980," he said. "The state of North Carolina's population is exploding. The talent is here. And the high school coaches aren't just the lifeblood of our program at Duke, they're our brothers. I've got to get them involved."

Cutcliffe is a popular speaker in the coaching ranks. He's spoken to the Texas high school coaches and the Tennessee coaches and the Mississippi coaches in addition to those in Pennsylvania and Florida and California.

"I've been invited to most of these state coaches' meetings," he said. "I've been lucky enough to be invited here twice. This is by far the best of all of them."

He talks a good game. All coaches do. But for the first time in a generation, a Duke football coach sounds like he might get this done. He's coming in with credentials and enthusiasm, and he has the attention of the people who can turn around the worst program in Division I football.

Not the kids. They will come in time. He has the attention of the coaches. And with almost every high school football coach in the state in town for the East-West game, he had them right where he wanted them.

At least for a day.

Contact Ed Hardin at 373-7069 or ed.hardin@news-record.com