Dave Sez

What To Do About Duke

Caulton Tudor has a very good, interesting article up today lambasting Duke's football program.  Tudor says that it's time to end the charade and that Duke should just drop to 1-AA.

If you watched Duke's thrilling 37-0 loss to Virginia on Saturday, you'd understand why Tudor wrote this.  Well actually, Duke's pretty much been at this point for a while, but that game was a particular travesty.  UVA is NOT a good team, but they completely dominated the Blue Devils without really trying very hard.  Worse, the game was apparently Duke's homecoming, but nobody came home.  Or if they did, they skipped the football game.  The seats in the endzones were frighteningly empty.  I'm sure if I paused my TiVo, I could have literally counted the folks sitting in those seats.  The only sections that looked largely full were filled with folks in orange shirts.  I'm pretty sure those weren't Duke alumni.

I did disagree with one section of Tudor's article.  He wrote:

The good news is Duke doesn't care about the steady financial drain. There's that much money in the endowment fund. Most schools try to raise donations by the millions. Duke rakes it in by the billions. The football program can be compared to owners of some professional sports franchises. It's an expensive hobby, but so what?

I think Tudor's missing an important aspect for why Duke and AD Joe Aleva don't push harder for a better football program.  It's not because they have a huge endowment and don't mind wasting money on football.  Not at all.  It's that they simply don't lose money.  Take a look at a post I wrote back in May, 2005, looking at athletic department earnings from the 2003-04 school year.  Duke made an amazing $21 million in profit that year, best in the ACC by $15 million!  Why change anything?  They don't spend that much on football, but still reap in their share of the ACC's television contracts, bowl earnings and now the ACC championship game.  While their paltry attempts at winning on the field may look pathetic, to an accountant, Duke's football team is a perfect business.  But not trying, they pretty much can't lose.

Another reason is that it's very likely that Aleva is trying to avoid killing the Golden Goose.  Mike Krzyzewski and the basketball program are a HUGE part of Duke's success, not just athletically, but academically.  The winning attitude that Coach K brought to that program (and it's not like they were chopped liver before) permeates the entire school.  Nearly every student and alumnus is a rabid college basketball fan.  It's probably very fair to say that Coach K is responsible for a huge chunk of that huge endowment that Tudor wrote about.  Joe Aleva's a smart man.  He knows that if he is to build a successful football program, he's going to need to spend a lot of money on facilities and coaches.  Top football coaches earn more than top basketball coaches.  Do you dare pay someone, anyone, more than Krzyzewski?  No way.  Not a chance.  It's much easier to build up all of the other programs in the athletic department, and Aleva's done a great job of that.  If you take football out of the picture, Duke might just have the most successful department in the league.

So what can be done?  What should be done?  The only thing that makes sense to me is for the rest of the ACC to step up and try to force Duke's hand.  Maybe set some sort of minimum standard that all ACC programs need to meet to stay as a full conference member.  I don't think it would be crazy to consider kicking Duke's football team out of the conference, but keep the rest of their teams in.  A better solution might be to penalize them for their failures.  If they can't compete with the rest of the conference, why should they get an equal slice of the pie?  They aren't going to bowls, they aren't an attractive TV team and they certainly aren't going to be playing the championship game anytime soon.  Maybe if the ACC said you must average at least 2 1-AA wins per year over any 4 year period or you only get a half share in the conference.  If you average under 1.5, you get a third.  Less than one per year?  One fourth and so on.  At some point, it would no longer be financially advantage for Duke or any other program to slide by.


p.s. The Duke Basketball Report, as you might expect, had their take on Tudor's piece.  They brought up some good points, but mostly I'm linking because of the last line of the article.  It's a nice setup.

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Posted by Dave at October 2, 2006 03:47 PM | TrackBack