This story originally ran in the 11.5 Issue of GoDuke, the Magazine -- Dec. 2019
Isn't Chris Rumph II too small to play defensive end at a Power 5 school? He weighed 214 pounds as a senior at Buchholz High School in Gainesville, Florida. Most teams recruited him as a linebacker and the recruiting experts all pegged him as a college linebacker. He was a healthy redshirt as a freshman at Duke, while two classmates played at defensive end. He's only made one start at Duke and that was as a linebacker, 2018 against option-oriented Georgia Tech, when Duke went out of its customary 4-2-5 defense into a more standard 4-3-4.