Friedlander: Roll your eyes if you like, but that ‘Brotherhood’ thing at Duke really means something

Before accepting the job as Duke’s new football coach, Manny Diaz placed a call to his friend David Feeley to get some inside intel on the situation in Durham.

“There’s just something about Duke,” Feeley, the Blue Devils’ strength and conditioning coach, told him.

That’s a difficult characteristic to quantify.

But if there was any question about what Feeley meant, it was answered Saturday afternoon at Birmingham’s Protective Stadium.

Instead of opting out of the Birmingham Bowl game against Troy, as most players in the transfer portal do these days, running back Jordan Waters, defensive tackle Aeneas Peebles and safety Jaylen Stinson suited up and played 1 final time as members of the Blue Devils.

When the new semester begins next month, Waters will be move down Interstate 40 to NC State. Peebles will be a member of the team at another ACC rival, Virginia Tech. But you would never have known it watching them battle for a common cause on Saturday.

Even interim coach Trooper Taylor, who will also be leaving soon to rejoin Mike Elko at Texas A&M, also stuck around and was genuinely choked up while talking about Duke and its players during the postgame celebration of their 17-10 win.

When they talk about “The Brotherhood,” fans of opposing teams instinctively roll their eyes and snicker.

It’s understandable.

In this case, though, it really does appear to be more than just a slogan printed on a sign posted on a locker room wall.

“The love of this outfit doesn’t account for the portal, for guys leaving,” freshman quarterback Grayson Loftis said. “The guys you sweat, bleed and throw up with in the winter are the guys you want to finish with. And we did exactly that.”

Lotfis, by the way, is a former 3rd-stringer who was forced into action because of injuries to star Riley Leonard and original backup Henry Belin IV.

For the benefit Boo Corrigan, his College Football Playoff Committee, Kirk Herbsteit and his buddies at ESPN, and everyone else who believes teams aren’t capable of being competitive because their best quarterback isn’t available, it should be noted that Duke won 3 of the 5 games Loftis started.

As for the outgoing transfers, Waters averaged 6 yards per carry while gaining 66 yards on 11 tries against Troy. Peebles had a sack and 2 quarterback hurries to go along with 4 tackles while Stinson, who has yet to announce his future destination, was the Blue Devils’ 2nd-leading tackler with 6, while also breaking up a pass.

Compare Duke’s performance to the no-show, under similar circumstances, another ACC team pulled 2 days earlier at the Boca Raton Bowl.

Playing with an interim coach and a 3rd-string quarterback — that is, when it decided to actually use a quarterback instead of having a tight end take snaps — Syracuse barely put up a fight in absorbing a 45-0 embarrassment at the hands of 6-6 South Florida.

These 2nd-tier bowls might not mean much in the big picture of college football. But you never would have known it by the effort these Blue Devils put into winning theirs.

To steal a line from the SEC, it looked like it just meant more.

Every coach in America talks about developing a culture for his program. It’s repeated so often that it’s become a clichè. But there is something to it.

Culture is important. And that’s a big part of the “something” that led Diaz to the Blue Devils.

“Ideally, you’re choosing a football team to coach. And by all accounts, this was a team that I wanted the honor to coach,” Diaz said upon his hiring on Dec. 8.

“The culture in the locker room … the type of players that were here.”

Duke isn’t the easiest job in college football. There’s the small fan base, the high bar set by its basketball program, the elevated academic standards and an athletic budget that would barely cover the cost of the legal fees Florida State is about to incur in its court battle against the ACC.

Other than the outside expectations, it has a much higher degree of difficulty than Diaz’s first head coaching assignment at Miami.

But it’s not an unattractive job.

Even with the departing transfers and the loss of several other starters whose eligibility has expired, there’s still enough talent left in a program coming off back-to-back 8-win seasons to form a solid base around which to build. That said, there’s still plenty of work to do both on the recruiting trail and the transfer portal to fill in the holes.

The one thing Diaz won’t have to worry about as he begins the process of putting his own mark on the Blue Devils is taking the time to build a culture.

It’s already solidly in place.

And that’s not “something” to roll your eyes about.