David Cutcliffe and Duke football dare to dream

• Duke football coach David Cutcliffe has led the Blue Devils to five wins this season
• Cutcliffe wants to be remembered as someone who left the program better than when he arrived
• Cutliffe liked the challenge that Duke presented

They had offered to send the private jet, to pick him up in Knoxville and whisk him to Durham, and the whole thing would have taken maybe 45 minutes. But as much as David Cutcliffe enjoyed being courted again, being appreciated, he wasn't sure he really wanted to get on the plane.

In the winter of 2007, Cutcliffe was thinking about leaving Tennessee for the second time in his career. He had done it nine years earlier, trading in one of the most glamorous offensive coordinator positions in the sport for his own program where he'd have to fight tooth-and-nail every day to compete. Cutcliffe did more than that at Ole Miss, but eventually, when he had won enough for the school to lose all perspective on what success really meant there, it caved in on him. One year after winning Southeastern Conference coach of the year and taking Ole Miss to the cusp of a league title, Cutcliffe was fired.

Did he want to go through that again? Did he want to engage that battle every day at Duke, a school with poor facilities, no track record of commitment to football and stringent academic requirements? Did he want to go to a place where, no matter how hard he tried, it might not be good enough?

For Cutcliffe, getting on that plane felt a little too quick, too official. So no thanks, he told the school president, don't worry about sending the jet. If he was going to take on a project like this, he was going to think about it in his white Chevy pickup truck, winding across the Smoky Mountains.

Cutcliffe didn't know the numbers, exactly, but he generally knew the history. No bowl games since 1994. Just two postseason appearances since a 7-6 win over Arkansas in the 1961 Cotton bowl. If he took the job, he'd be inheriting a team that had won two of its past 33 games.

"To tell you the truth," he said, recalling that six-hour drive through the night, "I did that so that if I decided I wanted to turn around halfway over, I could."

*****

Last Saturday, Duke beat Virginia 42-17 for its fifth win of the season. If all you care about are the BCS rankings and who can dethrone Alabama, it might not mean much. Duke's victims have a combined five wins over Football Bowl Subdivision teams, and it's certainly plausible the Blue Devils could lose all their remaining games against a tougher schedule and fall short of bowl eligibility for an 18th consecutive year.

Cutcliffe understands all of this, but at age 58 and with four hard, losing seasons under his belt at Duke, this is no time to do what most coaches would do these days and browbeat the enjoyment out of this week If there is one thing he has learned on his most unusual coaching journey, it is not to let anxiety over the next moment lessen the appreciation for this one.

"I told my wife right after our press conference after the game, the one thing I'm not going to do is spoil their party," Cutcliffe said. "They're supposed to be happy. I wasn't going to come in Sunday and say, 'Now put your feet on the ground.' I just wasn't going to do that."

It has made for an interesting week at Duke, with all the typical stories about turning the corner, the historical dichotomy with Mike Krzyzewski's basketball program, the school's facility upgrades (both already realized and planned) and how players are going to handle all of this sudden attention.

Nobody really knows whether any of that will apply in a month or a year or beyond. This remains, as Cutcliffe knows all too well, a fickle business.

But when you ask him what he wants his legacy to be, you realize that his career record will never tell the story of the impact he's made. What role defines Cutcliffe? A legendary offensive coordinator at Tennessee? A quarterback guru who mentored both Mannings? A head coach who never got a marquee job and instead did his best to win at places where few coaches can?

"I'm still pretty darn young, and I've got a long time to go," he said, "but I want to leave this place much better than when we walked into it. That's when you know you've done something right."

And if that's the way to measure Cutcliffe, it is worth looking at the arc of his career through that lens. Not only has he left every program better than he found it; many have collapsed after he left.

*****

Cutcliffe's predecessor at Ole Miss, Tommy Tuberville, went 25-20 and moved on to a bigger program at Auburn. Cutcliffe went 44-29, made bowl games five out of seven years (winning four), and was fired.

It was a little more complicated than that, of course. After Eli Manning led the Rebels to a 10-3 record in 2003 and left for the NFL, Cutcliffe immediately followed with his worst year, going 4-7 when Manning's expected replacement didn't pan out. Fans, used to a new standard of success, grew restless. Athletic director Pete Boone pressured Cutcliffe to make staff changes. Cutcliffe refused, and that was that.

Since then, Ole Miss is 37-54 and has fired two more coaches.

"One thing about college football is you have one or two bad years, they can get you out," former Ole Miss quarterback Romaro Miller said. "Ole Miss fans felt at the time they needed a change, and we went from David Cutcliffe to Ed Orgeron and you saw what happened. It was one of those type of deals where you don't know what you have until it's gone."

*****

Cutcliffe had planned to go to Notre Dame as Charlie Weis' offensive coordinator in 2005, but heart trouble forced him to resign before he ever really got into the job. After a triple-bypass and a year out of football, it was time to go home to Tennessee.

During the year Cutcliffe sat out, the Vols went 5-6, their first losing season under Phil Fulmer. It was natural at that point for Cutcliffe to come back as offensive coordinator, and the results were instant. Tennessee roared back in 2006 and 2007, winning nine and 10 games, respectively, and an SEC East title.

But Cutcliffe wanted to be a head coach again, and Duke was intriguing. So he pulled his white pickup truck pulled into campus, met everyone he needed to meet, felt the school was ready to commit resources to football and knew he could reassemble much of the staff to which he had been so loyal. If it worked in a much tougher league, why couldn't it work here?

"I've always loved people telling me I can't do something, and that fuels my fire," he said. "Everybody is different and I liked that challenge. I knew where we ranked in a league of 12; I knew right where we were and what better place to fight your way from than the bottom? That's just a continuous fight, but I don't know if there are many programs where every day isn't a battle."

It hasn't been easy, of course, and the fact that Duke was just 15-33 in his first four seasons was a daily reminder of how far the program needed to go. But he is on track to leave it better than he found it, just as he did once at Ole Miss and twice at Tennessee.

Since he left the second time, the Vols are 26-29 and may be looking for yet another coach soon.

"Cut was the best coach I've ever been around," said former Tennessee quarterback Erik Ainge. "He demanded things that other people don't even ask of you. When he left in 2008, that was a huge blow to the program. His presence was what made us a tough football team. What David is doing at Duke does not shock me at all. He is very good at what he does."

*****

Maybe he got a raw deal at Ole Miss, maybe he wasn't fully appreciated at Tennessee. But redemption doesn't come from failure as much as success, and the final piece is almost in place.

There are programs where it's hard to win and programs where the climb seems impossible, and Duke has forever been on the wrong side of the line. Which is why if Cutcliffe is able to pull this off, it might be a bigger accomplishment than anything he did at Ole Miss.

This has been hard work, getting to five wins by mid-October, and getting No. 6 might be the hardest yet. But no matter where you are, and no matter how many people forgot it, good coaches win eventually.

Is Cutcliffe a good head coach? The argument is now closed, even if he had to go all the way to Duke to prove it.
"I'm the luckiest guy in the business," he said. "People keep asking me, 'Do you think you've gotten there?' We better just enjoy the process, and if you don't like competition and don't like battles, don't take any of these jobs. I try to tell our players that: Don't be worried about the destination, just enjoy the heck out of what we're doing."

They're enjoying it now.