Duke football set to hire Penn State DC Manny Diaz as head coach to replace Mike Elko

Ten days after Mike Elko left Duke for Texas A&M, the Blue Devils have found their next head football coach. The university is hiring Manny Diaz, the Penn State defensive coordinator and former University of Miami head coach, according to a source close the decision.

An official announcement was imminent as of Thursday night, with Duke set to introduce Diaz, 49, during a press conference on Saturday. So ends a brief but critical coaching search for Duke, which is seeking to raise the profile of its football program during an uncertain and pivotal moment of change throughout college athletics.

Elko indeed bolstered Duke’s status in football in his two seasons. He earned the ACC’s Coach of the Year honors in 2022 and led the Blue Devils to a national ranking of No. 16 earlier this season before Duke stumbled after losing its starting quarterback, Riley Leonard, to injuries.

With Leonard, Duke beat Clemson in front of a raucous crowd at Wallace Wade Stadium to start the season. It then narrowly lost at home against Notre Dame in a similarly-frenzied environment, one that coincided with the school hosting ESPN’s College GameDay for the first time ever.

Duke football, long an afterthought during the 1990s and 2000s, became a national story. And this time, for winning.

Growth of Duke football program

Now Duke athletics director Nina King and other university officials are hoping Diaz can pick up where Elko left off. College football, long an economic driver of athletic department budgets and university status, has taken on even more importance in recent years, with schools and conferences chasing ever-more lucrative media rights revenue.

That chase led to the destruction of the Pac-12, the growth of the Big Ten and SEC and now it threatens the long term survival of the ACC. Duke finds itself in the middle of a shifting landscape in which football relevance – both in terms of competitiveness and brand power – has never been more important.

Since she became Duke’s athletics director in 2021, King has sought to strengthen a program that, at Duke, has long existed in the considerable shadow of the university’s esteemed men’s basketball program.

“When any rounds of realignment are happening, whether it’s schools coming into our conference, going out, whatever it might be, I don’t want to be left out of the conversation,” King said during an October interview with The News & Observer.

“And so to stay relevant and make sure that we are on the radar when the landscape is shifting, it’s going to take football being a consistently good program. So that’s why we are talking about that. We’re not shy about it, when we talk to donors, when we talk to Duke community supporters.”

For Duke, then, this was a coaching hire of critical importance. The university landed a coach who has been regarded as one of the best defensive coordinators in college football, and one who undoubtedly wanted another head coaching opportunity after his first, at Miami, ended in bitter disappointment.

Who is new Duke football coach Manny Diaz?

Diaz was the head coach at Miami, one of Duke’s rivals in the ACC’s old Coastal Division, from 2019 through 2021. His teams went 21-15, and 16-9 in conference games, and his final season ended in turmoil.

The Hurricanes began the 2021 season ranked 14th nationally before losing four of their first six games. Diaz never regained the faith of the university’s administration, or a frustrated fan base, despite a strong finish that included victories in five of Miami’s final six games.

Weeks of speculation about Diaz’s status culminated in his firing in early December. All the while, Miami had worked out a deal with his successor, Mario Cristobal, who then was the head coach at Oregon. In a statement he released at the time of dismissal, Diaz released a statement in which he said he was “disappointed in the University’s decision and the manner in which this played out over the last few weeks.”

“The uncertainty impacted our team, our staff and their families — these are real people that gave everything to this program,” Diaz wrote in a statement he posted on social media. “For that, for them, I hurt.”

Cristobal, a Miami alum, recently finished his second season at the school. He’s 12-12 over his first 24 games, with Miami falling out of the national rankings in each of his first two seasons.

Diaz, meanwhile, went back to his coaching roots and became the defensive coordinator at Penn State. Under his leadership, the Nittany Lions ranked 17th nationally in total defense in 2022, and allowed an average of 322.7 yards per game. This season Penn State has allowed 223.3 yards per game, the fewest in the nation.

Diaz is the second consecutive head coach Duke has hired with a defensive background. Elko was the defensive coordinator at Texas A&M, where he recently returned to become head coach, before he arrived at Duke in late 2021.

Diaz has also been a defensive coordinator at Middle Tennessee State (2006-09), Mississippi State (2010 and 2015), Texas (2011-13), Louisiana Tech (2014) and Miami (2016-18). His coaching career began as a graduate assistant under Chuck Amato at Florida State in 1998.

When Amato became N.C. State’s head coach before the 2000 season, Diaz followed him to Raleigh and remained on the Wolfpack’s coaching staff for five years. He worked his way up from a graduate assistant to a position coach who led the Wolfpack’s linebackers (in 2002 and ‘03) and then its safeties and special teams (in 2004 and ‘05).

In addition to his N.C. State roots, Diaz has a connection with Duke’s other Triangle rival. During his days at Texas, Diaz worked under Mack Brown, who’s now in his second stint as North Carolina’s head coach. After the Longhorns allowed 550 rushing yards during an early-season defeat against BYU, Brown fired Diaz.

He went on to rebuild his career as a defensive coordinator at Louisiana Tech, Mississippi State and Miami before earning the chance to be the Hurricanes’ head coach in early 2019.