COLLEGE FOOTBALL WEEK FOUR:
Duke, East Carolina, NC Central, Wingate
Among DG’s ACC/NC “Fun Facts & Shout-Outs”
By David Glenn
North Carolina Sports Network
(last updated Sept. 22, 2025)
While the focus of our “This Week In College Football” show is forward-looking as often as possible, we always take a glance back at the previous weekend in college football, too, and sometimes we’ll offer some quick mentions to those making impactful headlines on the gridiron, especially in the Atlantic Coast Conference and/or across North Carolina.
With that in mind, below are our Week Four “Fun Facts and Shout-Outs,” brought to you by our good friends at Jimmy’s bar and King Neptune restaurant in Wrightsville Beach.
Jimmy’s has a full bar, nightly drink specials and live music 365 days a year(!). (It’s a great place to watch a game, too.) Right next door, King Neptune has become one of the best restaurants in the entire greater Wilmington area.
Week Four “Fun Fact #1”
Through Week Four of the college football season, two of the six most prolific passers in major college football are right here in the Bold North State.
Duke’s Darian Mensah, the multi-million-dollar transfer from Tulane, is averaging 326 passing yards per game. East Carolina’s returning starter, Katin Houser (pictured above), is averaging 315 yards per game.
If you look around the country — and definitely at places such as Charlotte, UNC and Wake Forest right here in North Carolina — you will see a lot of teams that either lack the personnel to produce a functional passing game or that haven’t yet developed the timing and chemistry needed to develop confidence in that area.
One huge bonus of having a truly dangerous passing game — perhaps most fans appreciate this instinctively — is that a team has at least a chance to compete with anyone, even those that are perhaps bigger and/or better at the line of scrimmage.
That makes it a lot more fun for everyone, including the spectators, so fans at Duke’s Wallace Wade Stadium and ECU’s Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium should appreciate this special aspect of what they’re watching this season.
With this Fun Fact in mind, shout-outs definitely are in order for not only Mensah and Houser, the trigger-men in these prolific passing attacks, but their respective lines, receivers and coordinators, too.
#1—Shout-out to Duke offensive coordinator Jonathan Brewer, a guy who also worked for second-year Blue Devils coach Manny Diaz back in 2020 and 2021, when Diaz was the head coach of the Miami Hurricanes.
Brewer also was part of some very successful offenses and teams at SMU, under head coach Rhett Lashlee, before jumping to the Devils prior to last season, very soon after Diaz was hired to take over at Duke.
Keep in mind: Darian Mensah didn’t arrive in Durham until this January, so for the Devils to produce these big passing numbers so quickly is a tribute to a smooth and quick transition and the value of spring practice and the talent evaluation skills of Diaz and Brewer, among other things.
Brewer got the most out of Texas transfer Maalik Murphy last year during Duke’s nine-win season, but the Blue Devils were extremely wise to head into the transfer portal to pursue Mensah, who’s not only an upgrade over Murphy (now at Oregon State) but also someone who’s only a redshirt sophomore, meaning he also could be the Devils’ QB in 2026 and 2027.
Mensah has displayed all of the qualities Diaz mentioned during spring practice and again in the preseason: tremendous poise in the pocket, good arm strength and throwing accuracy, and very impressive leadership skills.
After preseason practice, in August, Duke announced that its players had voted Mensah one of the Blue Devils’ four permanent captains for the 2025 season. Each of the other captains is a returning Duke player, so the fact that Mensah made that sort of positive impression on his teammates so quickly is very impressive, too.
#2—Shout-out to 34-year-old East Carolina offensive coordinator John David Baker, who has mentored the Pirates’ starting QB, Katin Houser, over these past two seasons.
Baker and Houser (a Michigan State transfer prior to last season) helped engineer the team’s dramatic midseason turnaround a year ago, when the Pirates started 3-4 but — after their midseason coaching change from Mike Houston to Blake Harrell — won five of their last six games, including a triumph over NC State in the Military Bowl.
Houston hired Baker away from Ole Miss at the end of the 2023 campaign, after Baker had been co-coordinator for some explosive Jaxson Dart-led offenses the Rebels had under head coach Lane Kiffin.
At ECU, the Baker-Houser combination put up some huge offensive numbers in the latter half of the 2024 season, including 56 points against Temple, 49 against Florida Atlantic, 38 against Tulsa and 40 against North Texas.
The Pirates were limited to 13 points in their loss to BYU last week, but there’s not a single team on the rest of ECU’s schedule that can play that kind of defense, so the Baker-Houser combo should be able to start working its magic again very soon, perhaps starting this Thursday night — in ESPN’s national TV game — when 1-2 Army visits Dowdy-Ficklen Stadium in Greenville.
#3—Shout-out —at the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS) level — to North Carolina Central and seventh-year head coach Trei Oliver, who gradually has built the Eagles into one of the best HBCU programs in the entire country, making all sorts of the right kinds of history along the way.
Oliver, a star defensive back and punter for the Eagles in the 1990s, returned to his alma mater as an assistant coach for four years in the early 2000s before being hired as their head coach before the 2019 season.
Oliver led the Eagles to the HBCU national championship and the school’s first Top 25 finish in the FCS polls in 2022, then the program’s first-ever trip to the FCS playoffs in 2023. Along the way, he also has completely reversed the Eagles’ fortunes in the “Aggie-Eagle Classic,” which is Central’s long-standing rivalry against archrival North Carolina A&T.
The Aggies have had the better of that rivalry historically, and they had won four in a row from 2017 through 2021, but under Oliver the Eagles have now completely turned the tables and won four in a row themselves, including by a 62-20 score last Saturday in Greensboro.
We were there to see it with our Old North State Tailgate & Traveling Sports Circus, and it was quite the spectacle. The visiting Eagles put up the biggest offensive performance in program history, with 765 yards of total offense, including 366 on the ground.
NC Central also is once again among the favorites in the MEAC this season, and that conference schedule begins with the Eagles’ homecoming game against Delaware State on Oct. 25, so head out to O’Kelly-Riddick Stadium in Durham later this season if you get a chance. You might see something truly special.
Last, but certainly not least …
#4—Shout-out — at the Division Two level — to Wingate and second-year head coach Rashaan Jordan.
The 3-0 Bulldogs are the only NCAA team (among 32) in the entire Bold North State that’s in the national rankings right now, at any level, checking in at #19 in the D2 poll.
Last year, after the retirement of legendary coach Joe Reich (brother of Frank), who’s now the school’s athletic director after 23 seasons as its head football coach, Jordan led the Bulldogs to a 9-2 record, a trip to the D2 playoffs and a postseason Top 25 ranking.
Now Wingate is off to yet another impressive start, and this Saturday the Bulldogs host Carson-Newman, a quality D2 team that is coming off a huge victory over Wingate’s long-time rival, Lenoir-Rhyne.
If you haven’t been to Wingate — we’ve taken our Old North State Tailgate & Traveling Sports Circus there, too, and had an absolute blast — it’s between Charlotte and Rockingham, right next to Monroe, which is not far from the South Carolina state line.
If you were thinking of catching a game there, this Saturday night against Carson-Newman would be one good option, and the Nov. 1 tilt against Lenoir-Rhyne would be another.
Congrats and best wishes to the Bulldogs as they aim to continue their impressive rise up the D2 national rankings.
