It’s going to rain Saturday in Durham, if you haven’t heard. Ok, so, it is supposed to rain a lot Saturday in Durham. Football is a game played in the weather and it looks like Duke football in its matchup with Virginia could be playing in some very bad weather.
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What to do?
It is nearly impossible to prepare to play in rain, because it changes everything a team does. Virginia head coach Tony Elliott and Blue Devil boss Mike Elko both said they will have their teams do some work with a wet football in practice. “Yes, wet ball work will be something that gets incorporated into practice this week, making sure we are able to handle it and have a plan if the weather doesn’t allow us to execute how we want. We need to make sure we are able to handle whatever is thrown our way,” said Elko at his weekly press conference on Monday.
As stated already, it is supposed to rain a lot on Saturday. But both coaches know it is early in the week and things can change. Elliott said his staff will put together a gameplan based on what they’ve seen from Duke on film, but will have variations within that plan for bad weather. Elko said his team will do much the same, “Obviously with a hurricane you never know what course it is going to take. As we sit here on Monday it could be dry or it could be a tropical storm. You don’t know exactly what the weather is going to look like on Saturday night. We certainly will take preparations for the worst-case scenario.”
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Let’s hope it can’t read a map
I really hope Hurricane Ian gets lost on its way to Durham and kind of drifts off the coast or just fizzles before it reaches Bull City and drops only a tiny fraction of the moisture that is expected. Why? Because weather is the great equalizer in football and I think the Blue Devils are simply better than Virginia. I don’t want anything stepping in to try to make this matchup more equal.
As of this writing, I’ve not seen or heard any discussions on moving the game to a different day. But as Elko pointed out, it is early in the week and we don’t know for sure what is going to happen.