Recent events hadn’t offered much hope to the team that, after Auburn, authored the best story of the college football season. Having risen improbably to the top of the ACC Coastal Division, the Duke Blue Devils had been outclassed by Florida State in the Dec. 7 conference title game, losing by 38 points and needing a touchdown with 61 seconds remaining to escape the indignity of being shut out.
As fate would have it, Duke’s Chick-fil-A Bowl opponent arrived at the Georgia Dome averaging more yards per game than No. 1 FSU. Where the Seminoles had this season’s Heisman Trophy winner in Jameis Winston, Texas A&M had the 2012 Heisman holder, the even more famous Johnny Manziel. Could the 12th-ranked defense in the ACC possibly stand up to the raging Johnny Football in what everyone assumed would be his final bow as an Aggie?
This bowl season hadn’t been kind to the ACC. It started OK, what with Pitt and North Carolina and Syracuse winning their games. Then Miami was embarrassed by Louisville — which, to be fair, will soon be an ACC member — and Georgia Tech lost to Ole Miss when Paul Johnson lost his mind in Nashville. And then, on the final afternoon of 2013, Boston College and Virginia Tech contrived to get thrashed by the aggregate score of 84-31.
Which brought us to New Year’s Eve and what seemed the biggest mismatch on the bowl board — Texas A&M, with Johnny Football and the SEC’s best offense, against Duke, which last won a postseason game on Jan. 2, 1961, and had been beaten by a total of 49 points in its three bowls since. (That’s correct. This was Duke’s fourth bowl appearance in 53 years. Meanwhile, Mike Krzyzewski was winning four NCAA titles from 1991 to 2010.)
But all bowls short of the BCS title game share a sometimes-hidden undercurrent: Which team actually wants to play? Texas A&M had started the season ranked No. 7 in the Associated Press poll but had finished fourth in the SEC West. All the chatter coming into the Chick-fil-A centered on Manziel going pro or receiver Mike Evans going pro or coach Kevin Sumlin fielding (or not fielding) pro offers, and nobody paid much mind to the football team from the basketball school. Which made this halftime score quite the stunner:
Duke 38, Texas A&M 17.
David Cutcliffe had his Devils primed. They scored touchdowns on their first five possessions and settled for a field goal on the sixth only because the half was set to expire. They blocked a punt and executed a successful onside kick and ran through the A&M defense as if it didn’t exist, which for practical purposes it didn’t: Duke scored four touchdowns before facing its second third down.
Here we saw the reason the Aggies of Manziel and Evans and the massive left tackle Jake Matthews — who mightn’t look bad in a Falcons uniform — wound up losing four games. Their last-in-the-SEC defense is as bad as their offense was good.
It wasn’t until the third quarter that A&M roused itself, but such is the magic inherent in Manziel that you never felt the Aggies were finished even when 21 points in arrears. (They trailed Alabama, which has slightly better personnel than Duke, by 21 in the third quarter, and twice closed within a touchdown.) When finally a Duke possession ended without a point — they were halted on fourth down on the first series of the third quarter — Johnny Football took the cue and ran with it.
And jumped with it. And bounced away and found Travis Labhart for the outrageous touchdown that told us the Devils’ work wasn’t done.
Soon Manziel was darting for the touchdown that drew A&M within 41-38. Duke drove 75 yards, converting four third downs en route, to rebuild a double-digit lead with 6:46 remaining. Sixty-two seconds later, the Aggies were back within a field goal, Manziel having thrown off his back foot to hit Derel Walker for a 44-yard touchdown.
And then, 30 minutes before midnight, a New Year’s miracle occurred. The A&M defense made a play. Toney Hurd Jr. flashed in front of Johnell Barnes to snatch Anthony Boone’s pass and fled 55 yards to put the Aggies ahead 52-48. But 3:33 remained, and now the Devils didn’t need to fend off Manziel to win. They had only to score their seventh touchdown of this long and frazzled evening.
They could not. Under pressure, Boone tried to dump the ball off. It hit linebacker Nate Askew in the sternum, and he held on. In the end, the team from the basketball school had been undone by Johnny Football and his mates, if only just.
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