'89 Duke Players Don't Regret Their Photo Finish

That 1989 football season was different all around for Duke.

Coach Steve Spurrier drew up plays with Cheerio’s.

Duke tailback Randy Cuthbert ran over Clemson.

And despite a 1-3 start, the Devils closed the season needing a win at Kenan Stadium for a share of the ACC title. The Tar Heels were rebuilding in their second season under Mack Brown and came into the contest with two victories in two seasons.

No chance Duke would lose to North Carolina.

No chance, years later, that remarkable outcome would be forgotten.

Duke breezed to a 41-0 victory that included the Devils throwing with the win well in hand.

Duke's swagger in the rout was laughable in some ways, lamentable in others.

The victorious Blue Devils huddled under a scoreboard for a team picture, and the Tar Heels wore weary expressions as they closed their 1-10 season by trudging past the jubilant Devils.

The outcome remains Carolina’s worst loss in the series, and it’s easy to view that day through the prism of Duke’s exuberance being excessive.

But years later, as South Carolina's Spurrier prepares to coach in Kenan for the first time since the game, the Devils have no regrets about how they played, and how they celebrated.

“I think if we’re Georgia and we’re doing that against Alabama, it might be a different story,” said Dave Brown, the Duke quarterback that day. “But we’re Duke. We’re everybody’s homecoming game.

“There are not enough times in our football history where we had a chance to do that. If it upset some people, then so be it.”

Duke had not finished on top of the ACC standings since 1962. And 1989 marked Duke’s eighth winning season since 1964. Earlier in the season, the Devils took a similar photo when they won at Maryland for the first time in years.

The picture in Chapel Hill, Duke lineman Bubba Metts recalled, “wasn’t meant to be anything bad. We didn’t try to run up the score from what I remember.”

Carolina fans may remember that differently, but from the Duke players’ perspective, the outcome could have been worse.

Spurrier, Brown said, “would be the first one to tell you” he thought Brown could have played better.

“I threw for 479 in that game and he was disappointed in the way I played,” Brown said. “I missed a ton of guys. There were guys who were screaming wide open.”

The Blue Devils’ success wasn’t likely to continue – every Devil knew Florida was looking for a head coach, and Spurrier would be their target.

When the team was in the locker room after the win, Brown recalled, “Spurrier said, ‘I want everybody back out on the field. I want to get a picture to remember this by.’

“At that point it was, ‘He’s definitely going to Florida now.’”

He did, and the swagger Spurrier brought to Duke receded.

In the years that have passed, Duke has missed the imagination of a coach who could meet Brown for breakfast and draw up a deep pass with Cheerio’s substituting for players.

Carolina, meanwhile, would build up its program under Mack Brown. The Heels finished 1-10 in 1989 for the second straight season under Brown, but his rebuilding of the Tar Heels was under way.

Carolina would get its revenge with Duke.

Dave Brown can remember how UNC back Natrone Means ran all over Duke the next year in the Heels’ 24-22 win in Durham.

And the Tar Heel wins kept coming. Carolina has won every game but one – 2003 – since that loss in ’89. And Carolina has had its moments of joy that came off as jabs at Duke, whether it was UNC players ringing the Victory Bell at midfield at Wallace Wade Stadium or Carolina’s Dan Orner jumping into the inflated Duke helmet after his game-winning kick in Durham in 2002.

Brown, now working for Lehman Brothers in New York City, has that 1989 photo of the victory in his home office. And he has no apologies when he looks at that picture and sees his teammates and the proud, youthful face of Spurrier in the middle.

“Maybe we weren’t the best sportsmen in that five-minute period,” Brown recalls, “but you know what? We all deserved that.”

Whether Carolina did is another matter. Years later, though, the Devils remain glad  their moment of celebration is frozen in time - and framed in their homes.