Malik Murphy is in his first season as the starting quarterback at Duke after transferring from Texas (photo by goduke.com).

(photo by PonyFans.com).

It wasn’t that long ago that a game between SMU and Duke would not have generated much buzz outside of each team's fan base.

But the No. 22 Mustangs and Blue Devils each enter Saturday’s 7 p.m. (Central time) game at Brooks Field at Wallace Wade Stadium in Durham, N.C. with a sparkling 6-1 record. The Mustangs are undefeated in three Atlantic Coast Conference contests, while the Blue Devils are 2-1 in conference games.

The Blue Devils and Mustangs have met twice before, and there aren’t that many PonyFans out there who remember the games (both won by Duke) in 1952 and 1956.

The No. 22 Mustangs are the first ranked opponent Duke has faced this season, but make no mistake: the Blue Devils represent a tough challenge for the Ponies, having started 4-0 at home this season and 12-1 in their last 13 home games, dating back to the 2022 season. Duke’s only loss during the stretch was a 21-14 setback September 30, 2023, against then-No. 11 Notre Dame. Meanwhile, the Ponies have won eight straight on the road, meaning something has got to give.

The Blue Devils come into the game in the wake of a 23-16 home win over Florida State to get back on the winning track after suffering their only loss so far this season, 24-14, at Georgia Tech October 5. The victory was the first in program history against FSU, snapping a 22-game losing streak against the Seminoles.

"This is a very exciting week in Durham for a multitude of reasons,” Duke head coach Manny Diaz said. “Coming off the big win Friday night against Florida State … when you win games like that, you get the opportunity to play in more big games and we now have two 6-1 teams on a prime-time event this weekend. We’re 15-2 at home, playing against a team that’s undefeated in our conference and I think has won [eight] straight on the road, which is quite an achievement. We have such respect for Rhett Lashlee and his staff, who we know well.”

Both teams are bowl-eligible before Halloween, and if the right chips fall the right way, each can make a run at the top of the conference standings over the next month.

Duke offensive coordinator Johnny Brewer spent the last two seasons as quarterbacks coach at SMU (photo by goduke.com).

Beyond that, the similarities are harder to come by: while the Mustangs are lighting up scoreboards this season with an explosive offense that averages just over 40.7 points per game, the Blue Devils are winning much more defensive slugfests, scoring an average of 25.86 points per game while allowing opponents an average of just 17.29, making the Duke the 17th-stingiest in the country (SMU is tied for 35th, allowing 20.57 points per game) and ranks first among all ACC defenses.

“[The Mustangs] do a good job and they’ve got themselves competing for an ACC Championship, but we’re in the mix as well,” Diaz said. “We talk about controlling our own destiny and that’s a great thing. To have this game at our stadium, and have our student body do what they’ve done for these other two league games really gives us that boost. The more you win at home, the more fun home games you get, and that’s exactly where we’re at.”

The game also is a reunion of sorts: Duke offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach Johnny Brewer is in his first season at the helm of the Blue Devils’ offense after spending the last couple of seasons as the Mustangs’ quarterbacks coach. He knows the Mustangs’ coaching staff and their schemes, and the SMU players (except this year’s newcomers), and while he may have been distract the assembled media when asked about Saturday’s matchup, the first matchup he pointed to was the Ponies’ offense against Duke’s defense.

“Well, we have a top-five defense in the country,” Brewer said. “I’m anxious to see the SMU offense against our defense. I know what our defense brings to the table. We will score as much as we need to win a game, even if that’s two points. I don’t really look at the stats. I don’t even care about that. It’s about the team win and doing whatever it takes to win the game. We did that enough the other night. Obviously, we’d like to execute at a higher level and really put the game out of the question in the first half. We had the chance to do that [against Florida State] and we didn’t do it. We had to kick a field goal down in the red zone, which I think if we went up 21-3, I think the game would get put out of question pretty early and we would all feel pretty good. But we didn't do that and we have got to clean that up this week.”

The Duke offense, as would be expected, resembles the SMU attack in many ways. Brewer brought to Durham his scheme that often calls for three wide receivers, to go along with a tight end and a single running back.

Charged with leading the cleanup of Brewer’s offense is quarterback Maalik Murphy, a massive (6-5, 230) redshirt sophomore transfer from Texas with good speed and excellent arm strength. Murphy. His speed is deceptive, however — he is fast, but almost never runs the ball. Through seven games, he is credited with just nine carries for two yards … but with the minus-56 yards lost on sacks, his season rushing total sits at minus-54 yards. As a passer, Murphy has been solid, if unspectacular, completing 137 of 232 passes (59.05 percent) for 1,501 yards, with 14 touchdown passes against five interceptions.

Part of a deep, athletic defensive line, Duke defensive end Vincent Anthony has 15 tackles, seven tackles for loss and four sacks (photo by goduke.com).

His top target is graduate wideout Jordan Moore (6-0, 195), whose 31 receptions and 453 receiving yards (14.61 yards per catch) are team highs; he also has caught three of the Blue Devils’ 14 touchdown passes this year. He had just one reception against FSU, but it was enough to extend his streak of consecutive games with at least one catch to 33, the longest such stretch in the ACC and the eighth-longest in program history.

Graduate Eli Pancol (6-3, 205), who is second on the team with 25 receptions and 308 yards (12.32 per catch) and has caught a team-high five touchdown passes, lines up as the other outside receiver, while redshirt junior Sahmir Hagans (5-10, 188), and redshirt freshman Que’Sean Brown (5-8, 165) split time in the slot. Each has 20 receptions so far — Hagans has turned his into 194 yards (9.70 yards per reception) and a score, while Brown has racked up 146 yards (7.3 yards per catch) and a score of his own.

Like the Mustangs, the Blue Devils rely heavily on their tight ends, so much so that they list three possible starters: redshirt sophomore Jake Taylor (6-5, 235) and redshirt freshmen Vance Bolyard (6-5, 240) and Tony Boggs, a 6-4, 290-pound behemoth who made the transfer in the spring from his recruited defensive line position to the offensive line, and now to tight end. Boggs is largely a blocker, at least so far: he has played in four games and has not been targeted with a single pass. Taylor, Bolyard and Boggs have climbed up the depth chart because of injuries to the Blue Devils’ top two at the position: Nicky Dalmolin and Jeremiah Hasley’

Brewer acknowledged that there are clear similarities in the ways in which each team uses its tight ends.

“Well, it’s a tight end matchup problem,” Brewer said. “I think for any defense, you have to decide how you are going to cover the tight end. Are you going to cover them with a linebacker or are you going to cover with the safety, especially when you go man-to-man in situations? It’s the same way we use the tight ends in our offense. Once those guys get isolated in man-to-man and they’re covered by guys that maybe can’t cover as well, that’s a win for us. In our mind, if you look at the way we try to use Nicky Dalmolin, before he went down with his injury last week, and Jeremiah Hasley before that, it’s the same approach.”

The starting running back this week is expected to be 5-10, 205-pound senior Jaquez Moore, who has played in just three games so far and has held to 35 yards and a score on 14 carries (2.5 yards per carry). But it is graduate running back Star Thomas (6-0, 210) who leads the Duke rushing attack with 134 attempts for 616 yards on the ground yards (4.6 yards per carry), and his four rushing touchdowns are more than the three combined among all of his teammates; Thomas has averaged 107 yards per game over the last five.

The Duke offense is not flashy, but it is efficient, scoring on 20 of 23 trips into opponents’ Red Zones this season.

Defensively, the Blue Devils employ a 4-2-5 as their base alignment for a unit that has allowed 306.7 of the most balanced yards per game in the country: opponents are averaging 153.1 rushing yards per game, and 153.57 per game through the air. Many of the individual statistics are somewhat pedestrian, but the overall result is exceptional.

Linebacker Alex Howard leads the Blue Devils with 52 tackles, 11 tackles for loss and five sacks (photo by goduke.com).

More importantly, Duke’s average of 9.86 tackles for loss per game is the best in the country. Since facing North Carolina almost a year ago, the Blue Devils have piled up an incredible 101 tackles behind the line of scrimmage. In other words, the SMU offensive line, which has played well in recent weeks, will need an exceptionally strong performance in order to allow quarterback Kevin Jennings time to throw and to open up running lanes in Duke’s defensive front.

Thanks in part to the Blue Devils taking up residence in the opposing backfield, they are stingy when it comes to points allowed: after allowing 16 to Florida State, Duke now has held 16 of its last 21 opponents to 21 or fewer points. The 4.3 average yards per play the Blue Devils allow their opponents is the best in the ACC.

Like the Mustangs, Duke relies on a deep rotation along its defensive line. Redshirt sophomore “Vyper” (defensive end) Wesley Williams (6-3, 245) is the top tackler among the group (and eighth on the team) with 25, and is tied for second on the team with four sacks and 6.5 tackles for loss. Fellow defensive end Vincent Anthony, Jr. (6-6, 250) is a dangerous bookend, with 15 tackles (seven for loss) to go along with four sacks. Redshirt junior nose tackle Aaron Hall (6-4, 290) has at least half of a tackle for loss in every game.

“I think we played 10 guys coming out of this last game up front. So when you play five defensive tackles, five defensive ends, you're growing,” defensive coordinator Jonathan Patke said. “(Backup nose tackle) Christian Rorie … goes into the game and immediately makes a huge play. So as you start stacking good plays, you get more and that helps us grow our depth. But with the tempo and pushing the number of reps that you're going to get in the game to 80, 85, 90 snaps, you need to have great depth. We have to trust in our depth and have to roll out the guys early. We have to believe in our guys on that subject.”

Patke said he and his staff have been quick to pick the brain of Brewer because of his experience coaching in Lashlee’s offense.

“[We are] going to face a very similar offense to us,” Patke said. “Everybody has their own wrinkles based on their personnel, so you try to get inside of the mind of Coach Brewer because that’s like trying to get in the mind of Coach Lashlee, who does a fantastic job. He’s seen this defense when we were at Miami, so he knows who we are and how we play, and he's a good football coach. We’ll be ready.”

Graduate WILL linebacker Alex Howard (6-2, 230) has been the Blue Devils’ most dangerous defensive player this season, with 52 tackles, 11 tackles for loss and five sacks — all team highs. He shares the position with redshirt junior Tre Freeman (6-0, 230), who is second with 44 tackles.

Along with the WILL and MIKE linebackers (the latter manned by redshirt junior Nick Morris (6-3, 236), the third linebacker in the Duke scheme is the “STAR” — which is one of the linebacker/safety positions that is so popular in today’s college game. Freeman sometimes plays the spot, sharing duties with senior Cameron Bergeron (6-0, 190), who is fourth on the team with 41 tackles and has 6.5 tackles for loss. Bergeron also is the only Blue Devil with more than a single interception (he has two) for a defense that has picked off six passes this season.

Redshirt senior ROVER (safety) Jaylen Stinson is small (5-8, 177), but leads all Duke defensive backs with 35 tackles, and his three passes broken up are second only to senior cornerback Joshua Pickett’s six.

Diaz said that while the Duke campus and fan base has been enjoying the ride of excitement that comes along with a 6-1 start, it has not been hard for his team to remain focused on the task at hand.

“The cool thing is that we come in every Sunday and they lift weights with [strength coach] David Feely, so normally he resets the computer and reboots them pretty quickly,” Diaz said. “Look, we can play a lot better. I think that’s a part of it, right? … There's plenty for both sides, in all three phases, to improve on and that’s been our focus.”