The Duke football team had come up empty in each of its previous 22 games against Florida State, but the Blue Devils found a way to reverse history on Friday night with a 23-16 win at home.
While history wasn’t on his team’s side, first-year head coach [autotag]Manny Diaz[/autotag] said his locker room didn’t treat the result like it was something unprecedented.
“I really think they expected to win,” Diaz said after the game. “I don’t feel like there [were] a lot of surprised faces.”
The Seminoles, who didn’t lose a regular-season game en route to the conference title last season, lost five of their first six to start this year. FSU scored the first points of the game with an early field goal, but a pick-six from Chandler Rivers and back-to-back turnovers forced by linebacker Ozzie Nicholas kicked off a run of 17 unanswered points that gave the Blue Devils the lead for good.
“They’re very proud,” Diaz continued. “They’re very excited, but it had a very different feel. I really felt like they expected to win the game, and they went out and did it.”
Diaz rightly pointed out that, while Duke had lost each of its past 22 games against Florida State, that history didn’t include the 2024 roster.
“There are so many ways that we just tell ourselves stories that just limit what we think we can accomplish,” Diaz said. “Those guys down there, they don’t believe in any of that stuff. They don’t care about what happened, when it happened, whatever, they believe that they can do whatever.”
With Friday’s victory, Duke (6-1, 2-1) officially secured a bowl appearance for the third consecutive season.