Duke names Walker Eget its starting QB
Manny Diaz picked San Jose State transfer Walker Eget over redshirt freshman Dan Mahan to open the ACC title defense on September 5, with a rebuilt secondary right behind the QB battle as the camp story that actually matters.
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Manny Diaz ended the competition this week, naming sixth-year transfer Walker Eget the Blue Devils' starting quarterback for the September 5 opener against Tulane. Eget arrived from San Jose State off a 2025 season in which he threw for 3,051 yards and 17 touchdowns before a late-season knee injury required surgery and sent him looking for a graduate landing spot, per NBC Sports.
Diaz's explanation for the pick was almost anticlimactic, which was sort of the point after weeks of two arms competing for the job: "it was just about consistency, which is normally just what you expect from an older guy of keeping the same level day after day," the coach said, via 247Sports. Redshirt freshman Dan Mahan, who pushed the competition into August, will open the season as the backup.
It is a strange sentence to write about the team that just won the ACC — Duke's quarterback room looks nothing like the one that got them there, with last year's starter Darian Mensah long gone to Miami. Eget's job now is simply not to be the reason the title defense stalls before it starts.
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Last season ended with a shootout in El Paso
Duke's last game was a survive-it classic, 42-39 over Arizona State in the Sun Bowl on December 31, the finish to a season that delivered the program's first outright ACC championship since 1962. The Blue Devils closed on a four-game roll — a November 15 loss to Virginia followed by wins over North Carolina (32-25), Wake Forest (49-32), a Virginia rematch (27-20) and the Sun Bowl shootout.
It was the kind of run that got other locker rooms talking, and not always kindly to the committee. SMU coach Rhett Lashlee congratulated Duke on the title but added, "When you win the ACC, they should have been in the playoffs instead of a team from the Sun Belt. Hopefully that doesn't happen again." That's the bar this year's roster inherits, new quarterback and all.
The bigger camp project may not be quarterback at all
Diaz has spent fall camp on a different fix: the pass defense that was one of the worst in the country during last year's title run. Transfers Che Ojarikre (Stanford), Dylan Flowers (Western Kentucky) and Kyon Loud (Montana) have all been competing for jobs in a rebuilt secondary, with Ojarikre the favorite to win the nickel spot, per 247Sports.
Tulane doesn't make that project any gentler for a season opener. The Green Wave handed their own quarterback job to Houston transfer Zeon Chriss-Gremillion, with coach Will Hall citing his accuracy and turnover avoidance, and they return a deep backfield around preseason all-league running back Makhi McClure — who Pete Thamel flagged as an injury to monitor heading into Durham. If McClure is limited, it changes exactly the kind of test Duke's overhauled secondary was built to face first.
A near double-digit favorite for a defense still finding itself
Duke opens as the home favorite at Wallace Wade, with the line set at -9.5 and the total pinned at 52.5 — a number that reads more grind than shootout for a team breaking in a new quarterback and a patchwork secondary on the same afternoon. That gap says the market trusts Eget and the Blue Devils' overall depth more than it worries about the defense Diaz spent camp rebuilding.
DukeFOOTBALL has been counting down all week, telling ticket holders to "be there, be early" for the opener, and Wallace Wade hasn't hosted a defending ACC champion in a long time. Duke plays Tulane on September 5 at 2:30 PM to open the defense of that title, and whatever the number says now, this is the first real look at what last season's roster turnover actually cost — or didn't.