Scott Shafer sees something familiar in his Saturday opponent, Duke.

The No. 22 Blue Devils (7-1, 3-1 Atlantic Coast), like Shafer’s Syracuse (3-6, 1-4) team, hail from a private school. Duke head coach David Cutcliffe has overseen a transition from irrelevancy in the football program to make the team a conference contender. The two face each other at 12:30 p.m. Saturday in the Carrier Dome. And the Blue Devils’ transition is a private-school model Shafer’s worked in before, he said in his Thursday morning press conference, and hopes to replicate with Syracuse.

“There’s a sense of integrity with our types of schools, smaller private schools who give kids wonderful opportunities for the rest of their lives because of the quality of degrees that they’ll be able to walk out of here with,” Shafer said.

Shafer was an assistant head coach and defensive coordinator at Stanford — undergraduate population: 7,065 — in 2007 under then-head coach Jim Harbaugh. The Cardinal went 4-8 in Shafer’s lone season at Stanford, a year after finishing 1-11, before Harbaugh finished his tenure with a 12-1 season and an Orange Bowl victory to cap the 2010-11 season.

Duke — undergraduate population: 6,646 — went a combined 4-42 in the four seasons before Cutcliffe took over the Blue Devils in 2008. They went 15-33 in his first four years with the program, then reached back-to-back bowl games in the last two seasons.

“He struggled, he struggled at first,” Shafer said of Cutcliffe, “but they stayed with the formula, they stayed with the plan, they went out and got those high school kids that fit their program and now, especially these past two seasons, they got it rolling. They got it rolling with the processes that were put in place and the philosophies that coach put in place with the help of his administration down there.”

Throughout the season, Shafer has touched on the difficulties of running a program at an expensive private school because teams at such colleges don’t get many walk-ons. Players can’t afford to play without scholarship, limiting the number of healthy bodies a coach has available to practice and play with.

The Orange is currently mired in an injury crisis with a patchwork offensive line, quarterbacks Terrel Hunt and AJ Long out and doubtful, respectively, in addition to receivers Ashton Broyld and Brisly Estime having been in and out of the lineup.

Said Shafer of Duke: “What a great example of a school that can win games and also win in the classroom and be an elite school, like a Syracuse, a Duke and a Stanford-type situation. So for sure, we definitely do.”

Published on November 6, 2014 at 12:49 pm

Contact Jacob: jmklinge@syr.edu | @Jacob_Klinger_