Standing out on the Astroturf practice field behind Wallace Wade Stadium as second-year coach Carl Franks runs his offense while Bob Trott drills the defense, there are two ways to approach the season that's set to dawn tomorrow. Depending on who you ask, it's either a glass that's half-empty or it's a glass that's half-full.
The ACC media has made it undeniably certain which side of the fence it's going to stand on this season. If there are two things that nearly every sportswriter, radio broadcaster and color commentator were able to agree on at the annual ACC football summit late July in Hot Springs, Va., it's that Florida State would finish first and Duke would finish last. Fill in the middle seven teams how you will.
These journalists are convinced that a team that graduated eight starters on defense and lost both starting wide receivers is going to get worse before it gets better.
So are these "experts" right, or can the Blue Devils improve upon last season's 3-8 record in 2000?
"Now that's a big, big challenge," Franks conceded earlier in the week. "It is a BIG challenge, our team knows that. And we talked about what it's going to take to do better than last year."
To the few people cramped inside a Sports Illustrated office staring at pages and pages of statistics and crunching numbers on every Division I team in the nation to produce last month's College Football Preview-which ranked Duke 90th nationally-the answer is it will apparently take a miracle. Perhaps a few more bungled, last-second trick plays that magically send footballs safely into the endzone after being fumbled, thrown by one wide receiver and caught by another who was merely supposed to be a decoy, would be a good place to start.
But to starting quarterback Spencer Romine and the team's other three captains, the answer isn't nearly that complicated. When they step on the field, the Blue Devils need to believe they can win-not just can win, but should win.
Last season, that clearly wasn't the case.
In the 1999 season of "what ifs" and "what could have beens," Duke failed to hold late leads three times in front of its own home crowds at Wallace Wade.
Both Northwestern and N.C. State squeaked out overtime victories, while heavily favored Georgia Tech used two scoring drives in the final eight minutes to
For a team left for dead by nearly everyone with an opinion on college sports, all it would have taken for a respectable 6-5 finish was faith-in the Duke cheering sections as well as on the Blue Devils' own sideline. With that, a group of players that spent much of their season enduring ridicule would have spent Christmas Day vacationing in Maui for the Aloha Bowl, rather than watching from their living room couches while Wake Forest (a team Duke scored a school-record 34 first quarter points against) crushed Arizona State on national television.
"If you come down and you have a couple players that aren't expecting to win, that's going to bring your entire team down," Romine said. "If you come to the sidelines and they're kind of leary about the fact that we're up two touchdowns going into the third quarter, they're just kind of waiting for bad things to happen."
A few months after the season ended, Duke's veteran quarterback thought about how to address last year's problem and then he put it in writing.
Before the Blue Devils reconvened for summer workouts, every player received four letters, one from each of the captains. The message behind Romine's letter was simple: Duke has shown it's as good as other teams the last couple seasons, it just hasn't shown it can beat those teams. The time to start doing that is now.
"Why not us?" he challenged his teammates. "When we get into close ball games, why can't we win? It's gotta be somebody so why not us?"
Much like college analysts around the conference have done all summer, a few of you are probably snickering right now after coming up with a few reasons of your own.
There's the string of five consecutive losing seasons, not to mention the fact that Romine and the other fifth-year seniors have only been a part of nine wins in four years. There's the depleted defense and an offense that was unable to run the ball or protect its quarterbacks last season.
Franks as much as admitted that everything that's happened in the recent past indicates that the naysayers are right. Right now, however, Duke is out to prove that history doesn't have to repeat itself.
"If you look at it on paper and you are guys that aren't actively involved
Franks and the Blue Devils aren't hoping for the longest of long-shots, considering these same journalists picked Clemson to finish next-to-last a year ago.
It was nearly 14 months ago when Tigers coach Tommy Bowden managed a straight face as he told the media that it would be practically impossible for his Tigers to improve upon their 3-8 finish. With Duke's coach preaching the same message to the same choir members this season, it's now up to his players to reverse their previous fortunes and make the pundits once again look like, well, pundits.
"We're tired of getting kicked around," fifth-year center and captain Troy Andrew said. "We just have to come out every year and show them we're playing for ourselves. And when everybody picks us last, we don't play for you guys, we play for us. We're just getting closer and closer and tighter and tighter. It's us against the world basically and if that's the way it's gotta be, then that's the way it's gotta be."
There's no doubt in the minds of every Blue Devil that they can come together and be the thorn that sticks into the side of the rest of the teams around the conference. Defensive tackle and senior captain Troy Austin said the stale attitude that plagued last year's squad is gone and the Blue Devils are excited and motivated for the 2000 season.
With a slate that includes all 11 opponents from last season, there will be no surprises for Duke in the upcoming months. Well, that's of course not counting the surprise that Duke hopes to spring on everyone who has said that close to 90 percent of the nation's schools have a better football team.
"We believe in ourselves and we're trying to surprise everybody who writes us off because we don't ever write ourselves off," senior wide receiver Kyle Moore said. "We go into every game believing that we should be on that field and we should be able to win that game."
The first chance for that is tomorrow night against East Carolina-Wallace Wade Stadium, 6 p.m. Do you believe?
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