A week has now passed since Carl Franks was introduced as the football team's new head coach, and the period since has given us (at least a few of us) a reason to look back at the last five years of Duke football with closer scrutiny.
Where did it all go wrong? Can it be fixed? Is Franks the right guy for the job?
The latter two questions are speculative, the first merits another look.
How did Fred Goldsmith and Duke allow the momentum of 1994 to fade and let disaster take its place?
The easy answer, and the one a lot of people usually give, is fairly simple. Goldsmith inherited a veteran team in '94, those players graduated and then the whole thing went kaput.
But that's just not true. Following the success of Goldsmith's first season, there was plenty of reason to think the Blue Devils would continue to win in the years to come. They returned 14 starters in 1995.
Robert Baldwin was gone, but Spence Fischer returned, as did Ray Farmer, Corey Thomas, Bill Khayat and many others. It was a program that believed.
"The future is nothing but up for Duke football," Baldwin said at the time. "And it can definitely only get better."
The future was indeed bright. Goldsmith signed 25 recruits in February of 1995, including six Blue Chip All-Americans. Some, like Kevin Thompson and Dawud Rasheed, didn't turn out quite like expected, but others such as Sims Lenhardt certainly did.
"Winning made all the difference in the world for this class," Goldsmith said in early 1995. "More than half of these players we couldn't have gotten a year ago. With a school like Duke, if the football team is winning, the potential recruits would love to be there.
"If we can recruit like this for three or four years in a row, I'll take my chances with anyone."
Sounds kind of silly now, doesn't it? He may have been right, though.
Duke opened the '95 season with a loss to Florida State, but wins over Rutgers and Army, who admittedly aren't powers, had the Blue Devils pointed back in the right direction.
It obviously wasn't the same as 1994. For one, that team stayed remarkably healthy. A season later, John Zuanich, LeVance McQueen, Farmer and others all missed time with injuries. Billy Granville was suspended by Goldsmith for most of the season. Players admitted during the season in '95 that the intensity just wasn't the same.
"We had a lot of things in our favor [in 1994]," Fischer said.
And after holding together for a 2-2 start a year later, perhaps the most devastating loss of Goldsmith's five years came on the last day of September against Navy. A Parents' Weekend crowd came expecting to see Duke jump back over .500 with a game against an overmatched Midshipmen squad.
I remember how effortlessly Duke drove downfield on its first possession, and although the Blue Devils had to settle for a 20-yard field goal, it didn't really seem to matter.
Oops. Chris McCoy and teammates rolled up 377 rushing yards and pounded Duke, 30-9. This past summer, I talked to Goldsmith about that game. It still made him cringe.
It was worse than the Carolina and N.C. State games in 1994, because those one-point losses held Duke from a near-perfect season but didn't prevent a winning record.
The Vanderbilt game this past Halloween certainly comes close. Then again, that contest was probably the Blue Devils' first chance to overcome the mess that began in '95.
"We'll bounce back," Corey Thomas said after the loss to Navy. "We were wandering around, didn't know what was going on, like headless chickens out there.... We have a whole half of the season to get it going."
They never did. After the 2-1 start, Duke dropped eight of its last nine games including, once again, close losses to UNC and N.C. State.
The fact remains, and the players and Goldsmith will tell you the same, that the team, despite the injuries, could've won six or seven games. If it had, then Goldsmith would've moved closer to his goal of three or four good recruiting years.
Two winning seasons in a row and Duke doesn't go winless in '96. The players would've had a better idea how to win consistently in the ACC. Enthusiasm among fans doesn't plummet so quickly. The quality of talent continually improves and maybe, just maybe, you have yourself a football program.
Instead, Goldsmith never had another winning season to help in the recruiting process. His five-year tenure will at best be remembered for that initial season of hope and perhaps the start of something this past fall.
History could have been different. And if the Blue Devils finally find success on the field next fall, they'll do well to heed history's lesson and avoid the same collapse in 2000. These chances don't seem to come along very often.
Joel Israel is a Trinity senior and sports editor of The Chronicle.
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