This is the second of a two-part series examining the state of the football program as it winds down spring practice.
Carl Franks stands at the 10-yard line, hunched over with his hands resting on his knees. On this cool spring evening in Wallace Wade Stadium, Franks stares with a fixed gaze as his team practices goal-line situations.
He tries to see within the trenches, hoping to see who is doing their job, who is not.
It is Day 12 of spring practice, but as his linemen battle fiercely, a much larger war is being waged by Duke football.
It is a war fought in nearby offices in the Finch-Yeager building and Cameron Indoor Stadium. It is a war fought not by sweat-soaked students in shoulder pads, but by men and women in khaki pants.
It is a battle where the spoils are ticket sales and $100 donations. It is an off-field battle that Duke must fight if Franks is to elevate the program to the level he dreams of. But it is a fight that the Blue Devils have been losing the past several years.
As the team struggles on the field, it suffers off the field as well. Duke, over this past half-decade, has come to mean failure when it comes to the gridiron.
When Franks took the head coaching job 16 months ago, he knew he was in for an uphill climb. Now he fully understands what must be done.
"We've got to overcome the fact that people think you can't get the right kind of players to help you be successful here at Duke, because we can," Franks said. "It's been done in the past. We just need to be in position to do it more consistently."
According to Mike Sobb, head of Duke sports promotions, ticket sales have remained fairly constant over the past four to five years, though there has been a slight decline. The problem, however, is that the Blue Devils can't seem to attract any new fans.
"We have a solid foundation, but we're trying to focus on finding more people," Sobb said. "Even if every in-state alumni and all the students came, there'd still be 7,000 empty seats. How do you fill those up?"
Franks has his fair share of supporters. Loyal Duke football fans are as loyal as anyone can be, sticking with the team no matter what. Their loyalty has definitely been tried in recent years, but no matter how bad things get, there is always a core group of die-hards year in and year out.
This group continues to buy tickets and go to games, but beyond this group of fans, there seems to be no enthusiasm for Duke football.
"People don't want to wake up for games," Sobb said. "We have to make it become a part of the culture at Duke.... A few years ago college football was ingrained in our culture, but as different things became more emphasized and less emphasized, football has got caught under that tow."
For Athletic Director Joe Alleva, the solution is even simpler.
"It's not hard [to figure out]," he said. "I was here when the basketball team wasn't good and no one came to games. And I mean no one. It's all a matter of winning. If we win, people will come."
Alleva, the general of this off-field war, believes he and Franks are starting to turn it around. Since Alleva's promotion to athletic director in 1998, he has made football one of his top priorities. In his first year, he brought in Franks and began a massive campaign to raise funds for a new football building.
According to Alleva, the fundraising campaign has been met with open arms. Plans for a massive football building to be built behind Card Gymnasium are nearly finalized, and the department hopes to break ground in September. Thus far, Alleva & Co. have raised $13 million for the building and hope to raise $5-$6 million more by the end of summer.
"It's going really well," Alleva said of the fundraising campaign. "It's been tremendously received by everyone I've talked with. It's amazing how fast we're raising money.... There's a lot of optimism."
But Alleva's challenge is to spread that optimism to fans, and perhaps more importantly, to potential recruits. If Duke football is ever going to return to winning ways, the program needs to develop a deeper talent pool. A quick glance at the depleted spring roster reveals just how shallow things are currently, but Alleva feels that his new coach and soon-to-be-built facility should be enough to change the tide.
"We have to show recruits that we are committed to football," he said. "That's been lacking recently. But the new building will show that the athletic program is committed to building this program."
But there are doubters, chief among them the student body. In the past four years, Duke has won a combined nine games, leaving many disillusioned or jaded. Sobb estimates that only about 1,000 to 1,500 students come to each game, adding that that noon games are especially under-attended.
Although Franks is convinced he can bring in the talent necessary to become a winner, some question if an academic-intensive institution like Duke can ever compete with the elite of the ACC.
Only time will tell, but Franks, who has spent the past 16 months on the battlefield, believes the war will be won if given enough time.
"It's been very encouraging," Franks said. "We're addressing some needs that we have that are certainly overdue. Joe has addressed those and we're heading in the right direction.
"We are in a building process. As we go through this building process, there will be some growing pains."
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