{"id":184263,"date":"2025-08-29T09:52:17","date_gmt":"2025-08-29T09:52:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/184263\/"},"modified":"2025-08-29T09:52:17","modified_gmt":"2025-08-29T09:52:17","slug":"duke-crushes-elon-after-halftime-winning-45-17","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/184263\/","title":{"rendered":"Duke Crushes Elon After Halftime, Winning 45-17"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 _16w9vov6 _16w9vov5 ls9zuh1\">Elon put up a fight in the first half, battling Duke to a 10-10 halftime tie before the Blue Devils took them to the woodshed in the second, outscoring the Phoenix 35-7 for a 45-17 win.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">Darian Mensah got going after the break, throwing for three second half TDs. He finished 27-34 for 389 yards and was perfect in the second half, hitting 11-11 and connecting on his last 14 passes overall. Only Dave Brown had a better debut at quarterback for the Blue Devils, racking up 444 against Wake Forest in 1989.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">Elon did cut the lead to 24-17 but Duke ripped off 21 straight to put the game out of reach.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">There was a period of adjustment in the first half as Duke started the season with a new quarterback and a number of players taking on new roles, but ultimately the team settled down and began to excel.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1nfb3k4i _16w9vov1 _16w9vov0 ls9zuh1\">They probably won\u2019t have the luxury of adjusting like that next week as #12 Illinois comes to town and the margin of error will be much smaller.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Elon put up a fight in the first half, battling Duke to a 10-10 halftime tie before the&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":184264,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[1339,103545,2575,1317,1337,1338,62,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-184263","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-basketball","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-duke-football","10":"tag-main","11":"tag-ncaa","12":"tag-ncaa-basketball","13":"tag-ncaabasketball","14":"tag-sports","15":"tag-united-states","16":"tag-unitedstates","17":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115111444460787056","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184263","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=184263"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/184263\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/184264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=184263"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=184263"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=184263"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}