In case any Duke football fans needed a reminder of how close the Blue Devils came to upsetting the SMU Mustangs on Saturday night, offensive coordinator Jonathan Brewer made the margin very clear during his Monday press conference.
Brewer said he and the offense worked on the play design for the climactic 2-point attempt as early as the third day of offseason practice. Eli Pancol, who caught a 25-yard touchdown pass on the previous play to set up the conversion, and tight end Jake Taylor ran a mesh concept, running crossing routes at each other from opposite sides of the field in hopes of getting at least one defender lost in the traffic.
“It’s pretty much what you would want to call versus a man coverage,” Brewer said. “We just didn’t execute. We didn’t have guys rub the mesh the right way and set up the mesh the right way.”
Murphy, who needed to scramble to his right after the SMU defensive line broke into the pocket, tried to find Pancol, but with Mustangs cornerback Jaelyn Davis-Robinson running with the wideout in stride, the ball sailed just past Pancol’s reach for an incompletion.
“It’s those details, those small details, that come back to haunt you because it’s the difference between probably about a foot. If he (Pancol) has a foot of separation between the defender and himself, he probably catches the ball and we win the game.”
Brewer, in his first year at the helm of the Duke offense, made it very clear which party deserves any blame for the mistake.
“It’s one of those things that showed up earlier in the game and we didn’t get it corrected,” he continued. “And that’s on us as coaches.”