Guess it's time to lower the bar...23 losses in a row will do that to you. <img border="0" alt="[laugh]" title="" src="graemlins/laughing.gif" />
</font><blockquote><font size="1" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">quote:</font><hr /><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">
By CARROLL ROGERS
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer
Duke football has become a blur to Anita Caldwell, and maybe it's just as well.
Glaucoma has taken the edge off the nation's worst Division I-A losing streak for Caldwell, a 94-year-old Blue Devil diehard. She can make out shapes and motion from her 50-yard-line seat at the stadium named after her late husband's boss. But the crowd has to tell her if things are going in Duke's favor, and lately "crowd" is a term used loosely. Quiet is the norm.
"It's very depressing to go," said Caldwell, who doesn't recall missing a home game since 1933, the year she married former Duke assistant football coach Herschel Caldwell. "You keep your hopes up. You think there's bound to be some time they can win."
Right? Not for more than two years. After beating Wake Forest in the second-to- last game in 1999, this team has lost 23 straight, including back-to-back 0-11 seasons. A Sept. 28 matchup with Navy may be all that stands between Duke and breaking Northwestern's record of 34 consecutive losses.
Even for a school proud of elite academic standards and comfortable using basketball prowess as consolation, this is not acceptable.
"That certainly doesn't fit with our general goal of providing a strong academic and athletic experience for our student-athletes," Duke president Nan Keohane said. "If a team never wins, that's not a good athletic experience by anybody's definition."
Keohane came to Duke 10 years ago vowing to take the school to Ivy League academic standing. But after last season, she agreed to ease some academic requirements for football recruits. It's one of a handful of tangible efforts Duke is making to turn this tide.
But is it enough? Will it work? When? And, well, why bother?
Joe Alleva has spent 26 years at Duke, the last four as athletic director. The idea of dropping football, or playing Division I-AA, has come up "numerous times," but he hasn't paid attention to it.
"To be in the ACC, you have to play football," Alleva said. "For us to think for one second about not being in the ACC is crazy."
So, that said, what is a realistic goal for Duke football?
"That we'll have a good chance to win a goodly portion of games," Keohane said. "Don't ask me what that is because we're trying not to set quotas. For people to go into a significant portion of the games each season saying we have a chance to win this game."
The past
Duke's football greatness is ancient history to most everybody but Caldwell, who still has the 1937 Time magazine cover featuring Duke coach Wallace Wade and the caption: "Southward the course of football takes its way."
Most think of "Iron Dukes" as the school's top athletic boosters, not the nickname for the 1938 team that went undefeated and unscored upon before going to the Rose Bowl.
Scores of people walk by the bust of Wade between the football stadium and Cameron Indoor Stadium, never noticing the pink rose bushes planted there. They were a gift from the Tournament of Roses Committee when Duke hosted the 1942 Rose Bowl, after the Pearl Harbor attack and fears for West Coast crowd safety threatened the game.
Few probably know that Cameron was completed in 1949 with $400,000 from a Sugar Bowl pay-out.
Duke has been to just two bowls since 1961, while putting up only 11 winning records. The success of the late 1980s is chalked up to the genius of Steve Spurrier, whose 7-3-1 "Airball '88" attack featured mildly-recruited quarterback Anthony Dilweg passing for 3,824 yards.
"It's been, 'Let's find the next Spurrier,'" said Dilweg, now with the Duke radio network. "But you can't. He's an anomaly."
Dilweg labeled the one good season since -- when Fred Goldsmith took Duke to the Hall of Fame Bowl in 1994 -- "fortuitous."
Carl Franks returned to his alma mater in 1998 knowing that Spurrier, his former boss at Duke and Florida, is the only coach in the last 30 years to leave Duke for another college head coaching job. Franks arrived to a weight room Alleva acknowledged was smaller than typical high school weight rooms. Recruiting was a nationwide proposition. And the gap in academic standards seemed to have widened not only between Duke and other schools, but between Duke's football and basketball programs.
"A lot of people thought we recruited with the same standards as basketball," Franks said recently, rolling his eyes.
While Alleva began raising money for a new football building, Franks tackled academic changes. Together they began laying the groundwork for what they hope will revive this program.
Preparing for future
Franks says he earned a reputation as a complainer, pleading his case up the chain of command. But last winter Keohane agreed Duke should raise the number of "special admits" for football.
No parameters have been set on how many that will be.
"We both know it won't be a whole class of guys," Franks said. "We both know it's not going to be people at the NCAA minimum. And [besides] I don't want to be the guy who can't graduate people." Duke is also bringing up salaries of new assistant coaches to the level of those at other ACC schools. New defensive coordinator Ted Roof got a $20,000 raise from his base salary of $130,000 at Georgia Tech.
Making it happen
Franks is entering the fourth year of a five-year contract. Duke would have a hard time justifying retaining him after another winless season.
"We'll address it at the end of the season, but I really believe Carl Franks is doing an outstanding job in every area you evaluate a coach in -- his ability to recruit, how he deals with university people, how he relates with players," Alleva said. "The only thing he's not doing well is winning, and I think that's going to come."
Some 700 people showed for Duke's fan appreciation day in the lobby of the just- opened $22 million Yoh Building, which features state-of-the-art locker, weight and training rooms, and an indoor 40-yard turf field.
"Sometimes you can stand there and think, 'Wow, I can't believe Duke University built this,'" said Franks, a 1983 Duke graduate.
Duke losts its quarterback to academics last spring and 10 other would-be fifth- year seniors to graduation, either by choice or by suggestion. There are constant reminders of the streak, including a section on Northwestern's fan Web site counting down until Duke can claim its record Nov. 23 against North Carolina. But still, as on every campus in the fall, there's a sense of promise.
Defensive tackle Matt Zlinkski said the streak is talked about only for motivation, like at one winter morning workout when a 27-degree chill froze the sweat on his stocking cap.
Linebacker Jamyon Small is living proof things can change. He returned as Duke's sole senior and the only player who has experienced a win at Duke.
"I want to see these guys have that same feeling, same joy, walking around with their heads held high," Small said. "Who wants to be around you when you lose? That's when you find out who has character, who has the desire to play. I have to commend guys for sticking it out, wanting desperately to change the image of the program."</font><hr /></blockquote><font size="2" face="Verdana, Helvetica, sans-serif">
