By Louis Fernandez, WRAL Sports

Durham, N.C. — Football, as a sport, is full of clichés.

Offense sells tickets, defense wins championships. The low man always wins. You have to play a full 60 minutes.

They’re clichés for a reason: They’re usually true.

One of the big college football clichés, especially during the offseason and fall camp – praise for the strength and conditioning staff. And why wouldn’t there be? The group of coaches spends hours upon hours with players, building them and molding them into the strongest version of themselves. The difference between a win and a loss in November is the work put into training in February. (Another cliché).

You spend enough time around the Duke football program though and things feel a little … different. The strength and conditioning staff gets its praise, but so often, unprompted, players and coaches alike bring up one name – Director of Football Sports Performance David Feeley.

Feeley’s workouts are the stuff of legend.

“The things that we do in the summer are crazy” wide receiver Jordan Moore said. “I think we’re the best conditioned team in America.”

Moore is on the Biletnikoff Award watch list, an honor given each year to the nation’s top wide receiver at season’s end.

“The workouts, they don’t get any easier. This is my third cycle with him and he definitely turned it up a whole ‘nother notch this summer,” defensive end Ryan Smith joked.

“There’s no way I could survive Coach Feeley,” Duke offensive coordinator Jonathan Brewer laughed. “I don’t know if I would have played football with what he puts our guys through.”

First-year Duke head coach Manny Diaz praises David Feeley’s work with Duke football players

First-year head coach Manny Diaz has another way of describing what Feeley does for the program. It’s not an establishment of hardship, struggle and pain, but a place of piety and virtue.

“They got to go through the baptism through the Church of Feeley to understand what it means to play for Duke,” Diaz said.

When a football coach starts to sound like a poet, your ears perk up. Of course, there’s more to this religion than a revival.

“Well it’s got a lot of sacraments to it. There’s the sacrament of the track, there’s the sacrament of the squat rack, the power clean, all kinds of boxes, agilities, there’s all kinds of things.” Diaz said, dry humor taking full effect. “It’s biblical, there’s seven. Felley-ius, I think, is the original Latin term.”

But on the results, Diaz doesn’t joke.

“They get through there and they are born again,” Diaz said.

David Feeley’s tenure at Duke

Feeley joined the Blue Devils in January 2022, part of former head coach Mike Elko’s staff. Since his arrival, Feeley has garnered national recognition for the work done in Durham including being named the ITL Strength Coach of the Year and the FootballSccop 2023 Strength and Conditioning Coach of the Year. Despite Elko leaving for Texas A&M after the 2023 season, Feeley decided to stay at Duke. His reason? His family.

“My wife and my daughter were the drivers behind this,” Feeley told WRAL Sports. “Our daughter, she needs to graduate from a school.

“She went to four different elementary schools, that was really tough. Coaching gets a little rough at times. Everybody sees you on the sidelines, but you have families at home. My wife works, she works really hard with her day-to-day. Our kids just want to be kids and grow up somewhere and have some sort of foundation.

“I love Mike (Elko), and he went his way, and he was very understanding.”

Feeley and Diaz worked together when the latter was the head coach at Miami. Feeley was the director of strength and conditioning for the Hurricanes football program. According to Duke, while at Miami, Feeley designed player development programs, which translated into the all-time best roster availability for an entire season in program history. Feeley and his staff were named the runner-up for the NFL Play Smart Play Safe grant. It highlighted Miami’s strength and conditioning program’s success in the primary prevention of hamstring injuries. Feeley praised Diaz’s coaching ability.

“He is a master teacher,” Feeley said of Diaz. “It is really cool to watch him every day.

“It’s a treat for me because I get to see it again. And you know … he’s just a perfect leader for these guys. I think they relate to him really well, and he can deliver his message on what he wants on a daily basis, and they get it and they believe in it.”

Feeley also spent time at Temple, South Carolina, Ball State, Florida International and UNLV.

Translating results in the weight room to the field

There are a few ways to measure how the work the staff has done with players shows up in games. Obviously, there’s the actual wins and losses.

Duke went 5-18 in 2020 and 2021. Since 2022, Duke has a 17-9 record.

“(Players) didn’t come here to lose. They came here to be winners,” Feeley said. “How do you gain confidence?

“It’s through demonstrated ability and the more and more we can push these guys and show them how to get a win, and a win each day in the weight room. Their confidence builds up and three years later, you don’t want to say it runs itself, but the players drive this culture. It’s pretty awesome.”

There are the numbers and the science of it that is measurable. There’s also the fourth quarter. When players are physically at their limit after playing 45 minutes of football, how does a team finish?

In the past two years, Duke has outscored opponents by 73 points in those final 15 minutes.

“It’s one of the coolest things that you’ll ever get to experience in a fourth quarter, when the guys are huddled up and they start talking about their offseason training, and like,’Hey, we’re built for this,'” Feeley said.

Another measure of the success of a program – how many players make it to the NFL. For the first time since 2019, Duke had a player drafted in the first round of the NFL Draft, offensive lineman Graham Barton. He went No. 26 overall to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. Defensive tackle DeWayne Carter went in the third round to the Buffalo Bills. Offensive lineman Jacob Monk went in the fifth round to the Green Bay Packers.

During the pre-draft process, Carter said he was constantly speaking to Feeley about his training.

“Almost every single thing I did was replicable to what we do right here on the field,” Carter said. “We’re on the phone at least once a week, talking about strategy, stuff like that, talking about how things are going. He’s very hands-on, he’s a busy man, but he’s always on that phone. A lot of time he’s building relationships, checking in on people, that’s just who he is, he’s a great guy.”

Establishing a culture for Duke football

“To be honest with you, that’s the core of this whole place, when guys leave and go other places all we hear coming back from them is man, they don’t train like you do here,” Brewer said. “There’s a culture here, it starts with him, the toughness and the character and the way that he has built this place here, it’s remarkable.”

“The word that coaches use all the time, over use all the time, is culture, but here it’s a real thing and it exists in our weight room,” Diaz said.

The way Feeley said the team creates that culture, is by focusing on the mental side of training.

“There are so many people that are talented in this world,” Feeley said. “It’s really the power of their brain that’s going to carry them to places they’ve never gone before, Coach Diaz is a huge huge huge advocate of mental health.”

“The Church of Feeley changed my life man,” Duke defensive end Wesley Williams said. “I think that the real Church of Feeley is callusing in the mind, going through those developmental lifts and then all offseason going through what he calls Spartan Fridays and just doing a whole bunch of crazy stuff that seems pointless.

“It’s so that when you’re on that third-down rush to win a game or whatever, you know that you’ve got this, you’ve been through harder, you know what it feels like to be tired and push through it.”

“Obviously, conditioning our lungs and conditioning our body, but also our mind. I think we have a different mindset than most teams in America and you can’t hide hard work and we’ve been working hard,” Moore said.

These players, they spend time with their head coach and their position coach, but the relationship with a strength coach is different.

“You’re with the strength staff more than you are with the actual coaches, ’cause you’re with the coaches for spring ball and fall camp and throughout the season, but all those other times you’ve got workouts all throughout spring, winter and then summer.” Smith said.

Having Feeley and the strength and conditioning coaches stay in Durham, Smith believes, made the transition to a new coaching staff easier.

“You really need a strong base with your strength coach and I’m glad that stayed the same,” Smith said.

“They do see me every day,” Feeley said. “They see the strength staff every day, so they’re going to become who they are around every day, that’s just human nature, so you have to hold the line of accountability every day.”

It means waking up at 3:30 a.m. That means staying late. That means an open-door policy for players. Unlike his workouts, Feeley said it’s never a grind.

“You don’t get a medal for that,” Feeley said. “You don’t get a trophy for that, you get a hug.

“There’s no amount of money that can buy that.”

Source: wralsportsfan.com