Clemson vs. Duke labeled as a top 'sneaky game' in 2023

Clemson and Duke open their football seasons with a unique matchup against one another. The Blue Devils haven’t started the year with a conference foe in more than five years, plus the game is set to occur on Monday night of Week 1, a slot college football games rarely occupy and never once the NFL slate begins the following weekend.

In this wacky opener, On3’s JD PicKell expects some chaos on the field and believes there’s potential for a big upset to kick-start the season.

In a recent video for the On3 YouTube channel, PicKell provided a multi-step breakdown of why he has faith in a possible Blue Devil upset despite Clemson standing as a double-digit favorite at the moment.

He begins by questioning whether new Clemson starter Cade Klubnik is truly ready to shine as a top QB while using former Tiger DJ Uiagalelei as a cautionary example of why it’s reasonable not to fully buy in to a new quarterback yet. He also thinks the unusual scheduling, home field advantage and Duke’s own quarterback, Riley Leonard — an established veteran who is starting to appear on 2024 NFL Draft boards — is enough reason to believe this game will remain close.

Watch his comments on Klubnik and the Duke vs. Clemson matchup right here, or read them in full just below:

Unknowns with Cade Klubnik and new Clemson offense

“We got Clemson at Duke. Now this may be a little bit less sneaky because it’s going to be the only game that day. It’s on a Monday, it’s week one of the college football season. But if you look at this one, it’s at Duke, but Clemson is favored by 11.5 points and the reason why I think this game is so sneaky is because we all have talked so much about Dabo Sweeney and Cade Klubnik and how they’re going to revamp the offense.

And I think that’s true, but all of us think we really know something about this game, we really think that we have this game figured out and I’m here to just say, transparently, we don’t know who Cade Klubnik is. And I’m not insinuating that he’s gonna have a poor performance or that he’s not going to be that guy or not be a version of what we saw against North Carolina, but I just think we need to make sure we pump the brakes a little bit and understand we have not seen this kid in a 12-game slate. We haven’t!

The two data points we have on him, we have one really good data point against North Carolina where he absolutely took the game over, provided a huge spark to that offense, was clearly the better quarterback for Clemson in that game and the guy to lead them forward. But we also saw him against Tennessee and he kind of looked a little bit lackluster and it was a huge spot for him. Didn’t have a ton of help, still threw for a lot of yards — I mean, had a couple interceptions.

But even so, we know a lot of things about Cade Klubnik: we know he was a five-star out of high school, we know he won a state championship, like we get all that.

DJ Uiagalelei as a cautionary tale

But I want to call our attention back to our first impression of DJU. Y’all, I was fully bought in to DJU as a starting quarterback at Clemson, 100% bought in. You want to know why? Because he showed me that he has it under the hood when he went into South Bend, Indiana and absolutely balled against Notre Dame. Now, they lost the game but DJU put up video game kind of numbers — and we all watched that game, we saw DJU, we took a step back and said… Clemson’s probably going to be okay at quarterback.

He was a five-star guy out of high school, played at a powerhouse in St John Bosco in California, like everything pointed toward DJU being the next great one at Clemson. And again, I’m a big DJU guy. I think he’s going to be phenomenal at Oregon State, I think there were other things at Clemson that kept him from being as successful as he could have been at Clemson.

But even so, that was the game that we were all bought into him. Same deal with Cade Klubnik: small sample size but we saw enough of a flash to say — okay, we know Cade Klubnik, we know Clemson — and y’all, to be real, this is a game that could be very interesting, very sneaky — which is why we’re doing this segment.

Why Duke can pull the upset

“Because Duke, as much of a basketball school people want to talk about them being, they play really good football. Duke was a really good football team last year. This is the first game, so there’s already some sneakiness baked in there. Takes a while for a new quarterback and offensive coordinator to match at Clemson, but Duke’s defense has over half the production from a season ago returning that allowed 22 points a game. So they should be good defensively.

“Also, they have the best quarterback in the country not named Caleb Williams or Drake Maye, according to NFL draft Scouts. Like, Riley Leonard lit it up at the Manning Passing Academy. We had a lot of people there from the On3 network that said the dude was just dealing and has tons of physical tools.

“It’s also at home for Duke. It’s at home, it’s on a Monday — and y’all, we all understand this weird things happen in college football games that aren’t played on Saturdays. There’s no way to explain it, there’s no science behind it, it’s just a fact of life: weird things happen when you don’t play on a Saturday.

“Ask teams that get upset on a Friday night or on a Thursday, like how often do we see that happen? I’m not saying it’s going to be an upset, I’m not saying Clemson shouldn’t win the game, I’m not saying we’re not going to take Clemson to win the game. But when you look at this one, I think there is much more to it than what we’re all just assuming is going to happen with Clemson and Duke.

“So keep an eye on that one weird game, sneaky game. Do not be surprised if you get to the third quarter and it’s Duke up by three or four points and you’re saying… well okay Clemson’s got to put it together here, they got to put their their foot on the pedal and find away to score some points here because they they started out sluggish, that Duke defense has their number. Do not be surprised if that ends up happening in this game, would not surprise me in the slightest. But Clemson obviously has the better roster so we’ll see what happens there.”