Confessions of a Duke Football Fan

For the better part of my adult life, being a Duke football fan has been something akin to being a card-carrying member of the Libertarian party or putting ketchup on your eggs. It's something that's far out of the mainstream and always required explanation, an explanation that usually results in the kind of confused look your dog might make if asked to solve particularly complex long division problem.

At best, you might get a courageous cheer of encouragement in the face of long odds, as though you'd just told someone you were leading Lichtenstein on an offensive against Russia. More generally, people look at you like you just put $100 on the Royals to win the playoffs. The Stanley Cup playoffs.

Even during the four years I attended Duke from the fall of 1997 through 2000, the arrival of football season came with all the anticipation of Arbor Day. In the Gobi Desert. Though Duke would typically draw 1,200 to 1,500 undergraduates to every game (out of an enrollment of 6,000, which means more students attended games at Wallace Wade than next-door neighbor Cameron Indoor), football season was a way to mark the time. It was two months until basketball season, and it was the appropriate venue to let forth a long string of obscenities, a privilege now instead ably manned by the defensive play of point guard Greg Paulus.

As fans, the Duke faithful held the Blue Devils to a standard Sarah Palin would have been comfortable with: Play hard, don't embarrass yourself and it's a victory. And even in the worst times, the team put up academic success numbers that would make the men's basketball team's on-court success jealous.

And yet, from the 1995 season until this August, clearing that bar might as well have been asking for the football equivalent of out-jumping Bob Beamon.

From 1995 through 2007, Duke posted four winless seasons, was sued for, and lost, a sexual discrimination suit by placekicker Heather Sue Mercer, made headlines when a linebacker robbed a man in a wheelchair, made headlines again when protesting that "Duke sucks" should be legal standard to wrangle out of a game against Louisville and generally served as the longest running punchline this side of the aristocrats.

Why did the chicken cross the road? Probably to crack a joke at the expense of Duke football fans.

Somewhere in there, we're fairly certain they were started the subprime crisis, caused the common cold and sprung Chumbawumba upon an unsuspecting populace as well.From 1995 to the start of this season, Duke went 22-125.

Dial-up internet thinks it's been a bad decade for Duke football. Enron was amazed how far Duke fell. Pauly Shore's career feels pretty good about its trajectory compared to Duke football.

So somewhere in there, mentioning that my family has long been season-ticket holders had become something you mumble under your breath like mentioning you have a cold sore.

Of course, there were highlights along the way.

In 1997, Duke knocked off Army to end a 15-game losing streak and students stormed the field . Carl Franks' Airborne attack generated plenty of goodwill at the start of his first season and free T-shirts, complete with winged footballs. (We all assumed at the time, as I wrote years ago, that he meant Airborne like Steve Spurrier. Turns out he meant airborne like ebola.) The Blue Devils traveled to Virginia in 1999 and toppled a Cavalier team with Heisman heavy Thomas Jones for Franks' first win. Duke shocked Clemson in 2004. There was Spencer Romine, the star quarterback who headed off to medical school after undergraduate (no doubt to diagnose his own set of injuries caused by Duke's 'Airborne' blocking scheme. Romine, a legitimately talented quarterback, left every game looking like he'd gone 12 rounds with vintage Tyson and another 12 with an angry Tawny Kitaen), the delightful-to-pronounce Chike Egbuniwe and a never-ending series of wide receiver screens to Scottie Montgomery, a play that was to then-coach Goldsmith what the option was to Tom Osborne or the Soup Can was to Andy Warhol.

Then for a long time, nothing happened.

Until this week, when Duke received its first vote in the coaches' poll other than ex-coach Steve Spurrier's formerly yearly preseason thank you ballot which was college football's answer to the $2 bill your weird uncle always sent one month after your birthday

Don't look now, but Duke is 3-1 and within striking distance, possibly a Saturday victory over Georgia Tech, of being ranked for the first time in more than a decade.

Ponder that while you check the world's axis and consider just how remarkable a turnaround this is. It's like Damon Wayans becoming Lawrence Olivier overnight. It's like the Green Party replacing the Republicans by Wednesday. It's like the Detroit Lions ... being good.

And that's led Duke fans to an unfamiliar feeling deep in their gut. At first, it could've been assumed to be lingering food poisoning. After all, like any Duke undergrad from the '90s spent way too much of their time and lower intestine at Han's.

But it turns out it's a little something called pride.

Take that, Al Groh. Yo momma, Navy. Just Made U look silly JMU.

So what's changed at Duke other than a fan base that can now talk smack and string theory?

David Cutcliffe

While Duke football has always had its own intrinsic set of problems, stringent admissions, the hulking shadow of the basketball team, the administration's long-running and foolish attempts to turn the school into another also-ran Ivy instead of school people might want to attend for reasons beyond its U.S. News and World Report ranking, it's never been a completely hopeless cause.

But it requires one heck of a coach to wrestle all those problems and for years, Duke simply didn't have him.

Understanding why requires a decade backtrack to when former athletic director Joe Alleva took over for Tom Butters, a man whose face wouldn't just be on Duke's Mount Rushmore, but rather the man who would've raised the money to have it built as well. A superb salesman, Butters could've talked McCain into running on Obama's ticket and extracted a $700 billion check from Wall Street itself, solving the financial crisis and still have his afternoon free. Most importantly, Butters is the man who made the all-time home-run hire at Duke and maybe any school, pegging a middling Army coach named Mike Krzyzewski to take over a basketball program on the verge of its own personal recession.

So in Alleva's first two attempts at hiring a football coach, he went after the same type of career-defining hire. He eschewed experience, at one point in 2003 reportedly turning down former Georgia Tech coach Bobby Ross, who led the Yellow Jackets to a national title and coached in the NFL, in favor of the diamond in the rough. At a school that once turned down Bobby Bowden for a head coaching position in 1970, Alleva's missteps didn't sink the program by themselves, but he certainly attached a pair of concrete shoes to a foundering program. Alleva's first hire was Carl Franks, a former Duke tight end and little known position coach under Steve Spurrier at Florida. Then came Franks' last defensive coordinator, Ted Roof, who was the interim coach at the time.

Franks might've been the nicest man ever to walk a college sideline. He would give you the shirt off his back and then asked if you wanted it washed. In the fall of 2001, he even saved a man from drowning after pulling him from submerged car. From Sunday to Friday, he was as fine a tribute to Duke University as anyone that's been associated with the school.

Roof , meanwhile, was a magnificent recruiter and is owed much of the credit for Duke's success this season. Under his watch, Duke beat out Pitt for quarterback Thaddeus Lewis, beat out Miami, Texas A&M and a host of others for five-star defensive tackle Vince Oghobaase, managed to crack the top 25 nationally in recruiting and left the cupboard stocked for Cutcliffe with stars like Vincent Rey, Eron Riley and Michael Tauiliili. (Further proving that rooting for Duke is best left to the smart kids, notably those of us that didn't graduate with English degrees: Their defense includes an Oghobaase, a Tauiliili, and an Akinbiyi with a Okpokowuruk second on the depth chart.) Even Roof predicted success this season, claiming two years ago that the 2008 squad would be bowl eligible.

But on the sideline, they might as well have been trying to figure out cold fusion or straighten out the Raiders organization. Franks was 7-45. Roof was 6-45 and 3-33 in the ACC. Both men had numbers that were excellent for cholesterol counts and awful for winning percentage.



But Cutcliffe, who became Alleva's last major hire before leaving for LSU, brought an air of respectability to the program and the know-how to turn the Blue Devils' stockpile of talent into a winning football club. He wasn't a home-run hire out of nowhere; he was an excellent football coach Ole Miss made a tremendous mistake in firing. (The Rebels replaced Cutcliffe with Ed Orgeron, a man whose speech was as difficult to decipher as the decision to fire Cutcliffe.) Since his hire in December, the team reportedly lost more than 500 pounds collectively and the Blue Devils can keep up with what is probably the ACC's best pass-catch combination in Lewis and Riley. Teams have struggled to keep up with slimmed-down Blue Devils in the second half.

The results came quickly and were as positive as a Travis Henry pregnancy test.

The Blue Devils beat FCS school James Madison handily in the opener, outgained fellow brainiacs Northwestern 472 to 328 yards in Week 2, only to lose after a holding penalty wiped out the game-winning touchdown, and handled Shun White and Navy's rushing attack in Week 3. Last week, the Blue Devils scored 28 second-half points to rout Virginia 31-3, the first time it's held an ACC opponent to so few points since Spurrier's 41-0 road win over North Carolina.

After that game, Spurrier took a photograph in front of the scoreboard.

This year, it's just another win, even if it's the first ACC victory for every player on the team and snapped a pesky 25-game conference skid.

Three more wins and it's hello bowl. Nine more wins, including the ACC championship, and it's hello Orange Bowl. For the first time in a decade, a fella can dream, can't he?

After all, life may not always be so sweet in Durham. In Duke's last winning season in 1994, the Blue Devils started 7-0 before losing four of their last five, including a heartbreaking 41-40 loss to North Carolina that ranks with the Tar Heels' 2001 win in Cameron as the most bitter defeat I ever attended. (Even though Duke won the national championship in 2001, I still hope, a special place in the afterlife for Ron Curry and his allegedly injured ankle). And the schedule makers do the Blue Devils no favors; Duke isn't likely to be picked in any of its remaining games except possibly for N.C. State's visit to Wallace Wade.

And before long, Tennessee might come calling Coach Cut home if they're smart.

But Duke has come within a breath of upsetting Wake Forest the last two seasons, including a blocked chip field goal at the end of the game two years ago in Winston-Salem. Upset Wake, beat State and get one more break in an ACC that, on whole, should probably be relegated to the Mountain West or the Lingerie Football League, and the Blue Devils are bowl bound

So forgive us our moment in the sun.

And in the interim, we'll be gloating, even if we're still just marking time. But this time, it's not until the start of basketball season.

Because at Duke, bowl season is only two-and-a-half months away.

The writer is a 2001 graduate of Duke University and still can't believe Shane Battier fouled Brendan Haywood 45 feet from the basket.