NCAA Football duke Blue Devils

When Thaddeus Lewis arrived at Duke as a freshman quarterback in 2006, he had already given thought to his legacy with the Blue Devils. Lewis wanted to be recognized and remembered as the quarterback that started a new trend at Duke. It is called winning, a novel approach for a football program that last experienced a winning season in 1994.

Lewis hasn't accomplished his goal just yet, but he has certainly helped make Duke football fun again. The Blue Devils won four games in 2008, as many as they had won in the previous four years combined, and won their first Atlantic Coast Conference game since 2004.

Greg Paulus has chosen to go from being the focus of verbal abuse and scorn as a guard for Duke basketball to physical abuse as the quarterback of Syracuse. The senior has one year of eligibility remaining, and was one of the top quarterback prospects in the country before opting for basketball at Duke.

Paulus made the decision quite a saga, as he traveled from working out with the Green Bay Packers to a flirtation with Michigan before narrowing the field to Nebraska or Syracuse. He ultimately chose Syracuse, his hometown team and the one he originally scorned in favor of Duke.

First, the Green Bay Packers expressed interest in Greg Paulus, the former Duke University point guard and high school All-American quarterback. Then, University of Michigan head coach Rich Rodriguez had a meet-and-greet with Paulus about the possibility of playing in Ann Arbor this fall.

And today, there's this: Duke also wants in on the Paulus action. But unlike the Wolverines -- who could envision him as a quarterback in their spread offense -- Blue Devils football coach David Cutcliffe has no such plans. Nope, he'd like to kick the tires on Paulus, college wide receiver.

Ever since David Cutcliffe and his dual-Manning pedigree came to Durham, it hasn't been much of a surprise that quarterbacks are finding themselves more interested in getting in on the action. Okay, the one major steal Duke can claim thus far is nabbing Arizona recruit Sean Renfree after he turned tail on Georgia Tech. Mind you, he signed on before Paul Johnson was tabbed to head coach the Yellow Jackets, so you can obviously see his reasoning. And now, a proud report indicates that Duke has picked up another intriguing QB prospect who has put together a pretty groovy statistical resume: at Weddington High, Anthony Boone racked up over 5,000 combined rushing and passing yards, and he sorta looks like a miniature Greg Oden. Better yet, he's lead his squad to an 0-11 record in 2008! Wait, that has to be a typo, no?

Um, no. Turns out that dude might actually be the Ricky Davis of this high school football ish, racking up impressive stats despite playing on what appears to be a horrifically crappy team. Kudos to Duke for seeing the potential in this kid if he pans out, but maybe their PR team needs to do some spin doctoring, or at least some sort McCain-style bait and switch on relevant stats.

Remember those days when Al Golden thought a four-win year at Temple would automatically make him the frontrunner for the Penn State job when it opened up? If nothing else, it shows the usually uncreative thought process between your average head coach search- hey, he did good at (crap school X), so if he gets the resources he needs, it'll be awesome!

It's no surprise then that the new dude at Duke would be a hot commodity after leading them to four wins and counting- that's about four times what they usually can expect. Heck, it's not even totally surprising that he'd be brought up as a potential replacement for Philip Fulmer at Tennessee. Now, what if we're talking about a dude who used to be the OC under Fulmer and was seen as having been railroaded out of his last HC gig?

Well, as obvious as David Cutcliffe to UT might sound (and I'm pretty sure the boosters could foot whatever buyout necessary), he's put the kibosh on it for the time being- "I'm at Duke, staying at Duke," so says Cutcliffe. But FOR HOW LONG???? And really, it's not as much of a shock as you might think, not because he's wildly appreciated for his modest success. You could argue Duke has a better chance of getting to a BCS bowl in the near future.

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.

It's that kind of week, I know. As previously reported, not only did GameDay make the decision to head to Nashville for the Vanderbilt/Auburn tilt, but it wasn't one based out of novelty- it's the only matchup between ranked teams where neither experienced a galling loss. If that wasn't enough, there's actually a good argument to be made that Duke/Georgia Tech is the main course for this weekend's ACC smorgasbord as well. I don't know if smorgasbords have main courses, but I'll mix my metaphors as I damn well please.

Clearly, this is a game of maximum importance for each- Duke sits at 3-1, three wins shy of a possible bowl bid that was likely unthinkable for even the most delusional best-case-scenario maker in David Cutcliffe's first year. And though I'm not discounting how much the Yellow Jackets have progressed under Paul Johnson thus far, this probably stands as Duke's best chance for a win in the remainder of the season, as the schedule gets most unkind in the upcoming months (it's not like they get Virginia four more times). That Wake Forest/Vanderbilt one-two ain't what it used to be, and while N.C. State and UNC both come to Durham, I'm pretty sure the home field advantage would be negligible at best. Georgia Tech figures to be further at a loss with starting quarterback Josh Nesbitt unlikely to play.

Meanwhile, for the Yellow Jackets, the loss to Virginia Tech puts them in a bit of a spot in terms of reaching the ACC championship. Whatever you think about the Hokies, it's hard to imagine them losing twice in this conference. Nonetheless, as long as Georgia Tech keeps plugging away, they've got a pretty manageable road in spite of away tilts at Clemson and North Carolina. A game like this could easily be the difference between San Francisco in December and, say, Orlando. Yeah, there's the Orange Bowl as well, but c'mon ... when was the last time those two ever delivered something worth watching? It takes a lot for something to be deemed unwatchable on New Year's Day if it involves a bunch of guys chasing after a football.

"F--- everything, f-- me." -- Titus Andronicus.

I could wait and calmly deduce exactly what has gone wrong with Virginia's football program, but sometimes, white hot rage is the only acceptable response.

I understand that Virginia lost two first round draft picks (and probably the best player in school history), its starting quarterback, its best returning defensive player and won five games by less than two points en route to a 9-4 season. But when your head coach is being paid over $1.5 million per season, does that even come close to justifying how Virginia has transformed into what is unquestionably the worst team in a BCS conference. Say what you will about Syracuse, at least the Orange scored 21 points against Pittsburgh, which is more than UVa has put up against its three FCS competitors thus far. And yeah, one of them was USC, but the other two were UConn and now, Duke. You won't catch it on SportsCenter, but yes, Duke put a curb-stomping on Virginia to the tune of 31-3.

Where to begin?

The good news for embattled Virginia head coach Al Groh is that he heads into a match-up this weekend that might ostensibly not be a must-win, considering they're heavy underdogs, at least according to Vegas. And let me state in no uncertain terms that any sentence including the words "Al Groh" must almost certainly involve the word "embattled." The bad news is that being outscored 97-17 in your first two DI-A games, and peglegging it to a 16-0 win over Richmond results in the oddsmakers thinking your squad is a 6.5-point underdog to Duke. I don't necessarily have the stats to back this up, but I can't imagine that Duke's been a seven-point favorite against anyone, FBS, DI-A, the AEPi IM team, DipSet's interns, you name it in the past two decades.

Does that make it even more of a burden to Al Groh, though? He's 7-for-7 so far against the Blue Devils, but not every one of those W's has been a cakewalk. What happens in the event of a blowout? Does a Virginia win all of a sudden give the Hoos false hope, since they'd be undefeated in the ACC? Did I make this game way more interesting than it really is?

Yes, the decision came a while ago. It's worth revisiting, though, with the release of video from the hearing where attorneys for Duke successfully argued that Duke shouldn't have to pay Louisville damages for backing out of a game because Duke is so bad that anyone they got to takes Duke's place would be equal if not a better team (Hat tip to Lion in Oil).



This is beyond awesome. Just laying out to the judge how bad Duke football is.

What I'd love to have seen was when Duke's legal counsel went to the athletic director and school president with the plan.