... get the respect that he deserves?
Duke beat Notre Dame on the road today 38-35.
All Cutcliffe's done as a coach is:
(a) win a national title as OC at Tennessee,
(b) turn a weak Ole Miss program into an SEC West winner,
(c) transform one of the worst football programs out of all the P5 conference schools into a consistent winner,
(d) have 3 consecutive winning seasons at Duke, and
(e) develop one of the greatest QBs of all-time!
Seriously ... how is Cutcliffe still so underrated as a coach?!
Don't get me wrong, I like the guy and I think he's a fantastic OC and great QB coach, but there's still some differences between having the distinction between being a great OC and being a great HC...so I'm unsure what you're asking/suggesting should have been done here?
What he's done is a fantastic job at Duke to the point that it has competed for bowl games the last 4 years - I'm not sure that makes them consistently a winner - but if their falloff in the first 3 games leads to them not making a bowl game and they don't recover, then the story would become not that he made them a consistent winner (again I'm not even sure I'd argue that idea now), but that he gave them a nice little spurt of bowl appearances before they inevitably fell back to the norm.
Also, unfortunately, Duke's seasons in 2013 and 2014 are subject to pretty much same criticism among the ACC fans that, say, the Missouri teams in 2013 and 2014 get from the SEC fans: the main/traditional division powers were down. Duke's 10-win regular season in 2013 saw UNC and VT both as 6-7 win teams, Miami ended the regular season unranked, Duke got to avoid playing Clemson and FSU (and win they did play FSU, they were blown away). Then in 2014, Miami, VT, and UNC were all 6-win teams, and Duke again avoided teams like Clemson, FSU, and Louisville in the schedule.
But he's gotten recognition (he won several coach of the year awards both nationally for 2013 and one in the ACC and one in the SEC), and what he's done for/at Duke is phenomenal...he's essentially almost the best coach the Blue Devils have ever had, but I'm not sure what more you're asking be done with regards to him?
(And you are aware that Ole Miss didn't win the SEC West in 2003, right? They hang that banner to make themselves feel better compared to everyone else in the West's accolades.)
