Catching On
Wide receivers making a major difference
Jim Sumner, GoDuke The Magazine
These interviews originally appeared in the 14.2 Issue of GoDuke the Magazine -- September 2022.
“I think we have weapons in that room, and obviously weapons are a huge part of modern college football.”
That’s Mike Elko’s succinct analysis of Duke’s wide receiver corps.
Duke may not have a star at wide receiver, although they have an emerging talent who might reach that level; more on that later. But they have depth, experience and lots of options for sophomore quarterback Riley Leonard.
Through the first six games, 15 different Duke wide receivers have notched a reception. Senior Eli Pancol had an 81-yard reception against Northwestern. Fellow senior Jalon Calhoun had a 51-yard catch against the Wildcats and a 40-yarder at Kansas. Sophomore Jordan Moore had a 52-yard grab vs. Temple. And redshirt freshman Sahmir Hagans hauled in a 41-yarder and a 39-yarder.
And there should be better to come.
Shepherding this talent is wide receivers coach and passing game coordinator Zohn Burden, who came to Duke from Maryland. Burden has an interesting profile. He was a wide receiver at VMI but much of his coaching career has been coaching running backs.
Burden was at Virginia Tech from 2015 through 2019, a period when David Cutcliffe had some very competitive teams, so Burden says he knows first-hand that Duke football can win.
“I always had respect for the talent level at Duke,” he said. “The biggest thing for me was just trying to find guys who had a winning mentality. The challenge coming here was that the team hadn’t been that successful. They really want to win and they’ve bought in to everything we’ve tried to teach.”
Burden said that he’s used his experience coaching running backs to help his Duke receivers become more physical.
“That taught me as a coach the inside game, and it did kind of change my mentality that you have to be a whole lot more physical. A lot of that carries over to the perimeter part of the game. A mantra we have is that the wide receiver position is a physical position. People think this is all about running routes and catching balls and scoring touchdowns. But we start with trying to be physical in the run game and blocking well and that carries over to the passing game.”
That toughness was epitomized by Pancol’s catch against Northwestern, one in which he was held and pushed for 30 yards before making the catch through contact. Northwestern’s Cameron Mitchell was flagged for pass interference but it didn’t matter.
“That was one of our emphases, making competitive catches,” said Pancol, who also had a physical 49-yard grab at Kansas to set up a touchdown. “We knew they were a big, strong, physical team, a Big Ten team and we knew what we had to do. We had to be aggressive and that goes back to the training days, the summer in the weight room and in camp making competitive catches against our defense.”
Physicality isn’t the only point of emphasis. Elko wanted good teachers on his staff and Burden is a good teacher.
“It all starts with fundamentals,” according to Burden. “Showing them the techniques I’ve been teaching them have been working for years. We’re not going to just line up and run by people. We’ve got to be able to create separation and those guys have bought into the fine details.”
Calhoun certainly has.
“It all comes down to route running,” explained the veteran, with 164 catches in 41 career games. “Coach Burden did a great job with that, teaching us more techniques to get off releases, reading the defenses, stuff like that.”
Calhoun has been the most productive of the three seniors; Darrell Harding, Jr. is the third. Calhoun had six receptions for 90 yards against Temple, six for 108 yards against Northwestern and five for 93 yards at Kansas, all while claiming the role of one of Duke’s top punt returners.
Burden says he challenged Calhoun last spring.
“He’s playing at a really, really high level. To be completely honest, when I got here it was his practice habits. He was the first guy I met with when I got here. I sat him down and told him, ‘if your goal is to get to the next level, you’re going to have to practice harder,’ and he bought in to that and he’s practicing harder than any receiver on the team.”
Calhoun’s take?
“When Coach (OC Kevin) Johns and the whole staff came in, we knew our whole offense would be different, the whole playbook would be different. So we knew for us to be good, to go where we want to go, we were going to have to go in and get more and more reps — during camp, after practice, spring ball workouts. Any time we had some down time we worked on getting that timing down.”
“Jalon is in a really good head space right now,” Elko added, “and I’m really happy with where he’s at. He’s competing every day. He’s got a really good focus. He’s extremely athletic and he’s gone out and made big-time plays for us.”
Hagans has emerged as a deep threat, someone who can “take the top off the defense” in today’s parlance.
And then there’s Jordan Moore. Leonard and Moore were locked in the quarterback competition all spring and much of the fall before the decision was made to go with Leonard and move Moore to wide receiver, a position he had never played extensively before.
Moore could have pouted or worse.
“He could have transferred,” Elko acknowledged. “That’s what 90 percent of kids seem to want to do these days when these things don’t go exactly the way you write them up and that’s just kind of the world we live in now. But he didn’t. He jumped at the opportunity to help the team. He jumped at the opportunity to play wide receiver and he believed in what we were talking about.”
Moore said he just wanted to do what the team needed.
“I just want to make the best of it and I want to win, and if that helps the team win, that’s what I want to do.”
Moore showcased top-tier athleticism as a running quarterback and quickly was able to transfer that to his new position.
“You never know what it’s going to look like,” Elko said. “We were nervous the first day because you know you have this tremendous athlete and he’s going out at wide receiver and we’ve all seen that not translate. But it took us about three minutes to realize he was going to transition smooth and then you put in the fact that he’s such a tremendous character kid and he’s such a hard worker, that you just know he’s going to get better every time he goes out to practice and he obviously has a lot to work on and improve just from a technique standpoint.”
Burden adds some additional context.
“When you play quarterback you have the ball in your hands. You have to be able to handle bad snaps. He’s got good hands.”
What does Moore need to work on?
“Learn patience and learn the game,” Burden says. “Fine-tune the details and getting more physical, making contested catches and learning how to block.”
Calhoun was a high school quarterback before switching to wide receiver at Duke and he’s giving Moore the benefit of that experience.
“He’s just a natural athlete. I never had a doubt he could make that switch. We stay after practice later. He’s one of the hardest-working dudes I’ve ever met. So, anytime we have a chance to work late, we take it.”
Barely a month after starting that new position, Moore caught a 52-yard pass against Temple on the third play of the season. He had a toe-tap touchdown catch in the back of the end zone at Northwestern, and had 42 yards running after the catch among his 68 receiving yards (on seven catches) at Kansas.
So, yes, Duke may have a potential star on its hands at wide receiver.
And they’re treating him like one, lining him up all over the field, putting him in motion, using reverses and end-arounds and screens, anything to get him the ball in space.
“I’m having a lot of fun,” Moore said. “It feels like backyard football really when I’m out there and if the coaches trust me to put me in those positions, then I have confidence in myself to make those plays.”
Calhoun, Pancol, Hagans and Moore represents an impressive rotation. But Burden says Duke needs more from Harding, Jontavis Robertson, and Malik Bowen-Sims.
“We want to roll seven or eight guys out there. At some point we’re going to need those guys. It’s a 12-game season. They need to keep preparing and be ready when their name is called.”
“There’s room for improvement,” Burden sums up. “The sky’s the limit, if these guys continue to work like they’ve been working.”
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