In case you missed it (and with the Duke TV deal consisting of two goats and a cathode ray tube you probably did), the football team is on its way to another crap-tacular season.
But don't blame this mess on head coach Carl Franks.
When Franks arrived at Duke a year or so ago, he told us he was taking Duke football airborne.
Of course we thought he meant airborne like Steve Spurrier.
Turns out he meant like Ebola.
And yet still, after a blessed one-game reprieve, some chuckleberry brought back "The Tradition of Traditions."
I guess I just didn't make myself clear with the whole Soc. 10: Class of Classes analogy, so maybe I'll have to come back to it.
But for now, the owner of the sign (sports promotions, I'm looking in your direction), probably has more to deal with surrounding Fred Goldsmith, the woman-loving softie of woman-loving softies.
Now, there are some things I don't understand. I don't understand organic chemistry, I don't understand why my roommate has 15 T-shirts from the same crappy club in Myrtle Beach and I don't understand why there was a flip-flop in a tree branch on the BC walkway all day yesterday (the sheer physics of it boggles the mind).
Add to that why every alumni (and cheerleader) who writes to the "Quote. No quotation marks," edit pages of our fine paper wants to put the fault for Duke football's general crappiness right on our Abercrombie & Fitch-wearing shoulders.
We don't support the team, we criticize too much, we should all thank the football team for actually tolerating our poor support.
Maybe you could you please tell us one more time about how glorious and wonderful Duke was when everybody was rocking out to the great tunes of the Thompson Twins and sporting frickin Ponys. And I'm sure you were all such great fans of the football team, and you all supported the tennis team and you all bussed from the lacrosse field to the golf course because you supported your school like the good little Devil you were.
Just a thought, but instead of telling me for the 20 millionth time how much better the Cameron Crazies or the social life was back in the Johnson administration (Andrew or Lyndon, your pick), how about you take your frickin True Blue soda and stick it directly up your Devils' Den.
Look, blaming us is like blaming the cook of the Titanic for sinking the damn ship.
Sheesh.
It's not that I don't like hearing from our alumni and it's not that I don't appreciate the history of the University, but you were all the same goofy faux-adults we are now, and no matter how much you want to glorify your own four years, we're all the same stupid chuckleberries.
And you may as well just back off when it comes to fan support of the football team, because Rick Majerus jumping up and down on a wooden bridge wouldn't make for shakier ground than you'd be standing on.
Despite the fact that Duke football has had roughly all the success of a Mike Tyson self-help book in the last year or 200, according to the only man I've ever met from Buffalo, Norm Bradley, there were 2,000 students at the big, uh, rivalry game with East Carolina, a school that inexplicably counts its lucky stars to be in Conference USA.
Sure, there was all the drama of the game-a squeaker ECU won in the last 58 minutes with a 38-0 run-to keep people around on a drizzly Saturday night, but they still showed up at the next home game against Virginia. Even after having been outscored 76-5 all season (114-5 if you include the season finale against UNC last year) and remaining winless since the last Kappa Sig frat party, 1,500 students showed up at Wally Wade.
Hell, we've got an offense that wouldn't understand touchdown if Hellen Keller explained touch and Monica Lewinsky explained down and still we're averaging over 1,500 students per game.
Never mind that the team averages roughly three picometers of offense a down, we're still there.
And even at the end of the season, when the only 'W' anybody in Durham will be seeing will be on the presidential election ballot, we're still going to average more students at football games than we do at basketball games.
It's just math. Duke has roughly 6,000 undergraduates; Wally Wade has roughly 36,000 seats. If every single one of us shows up to the game, there are still 30,000 empty seats. Hell, even if every single one of us shows up with a club-footed friend named Pedro, there's still 24,000 empty seats.
And we're not the only ones with the student attendance "problem." Michigan's student section only accommodates about 25 percent of its student body to fill its section, leaving roughly 100,000 seats empty in the Big House.
But a funny thing happens at Michigan. Alumni actually show up to the games instead of bitching through the student newspaper. Fancy that.
And it's not Michigan, it's every football school in the country. Stadiums get about a quarter of the student body to turn out and all the rest of the space is taken up by alumni. ECU even did it in our own stadium. Change the Pirate fans from purple to blue and turn the Dale Earnhardt bumper stickers into New Jersey license plates and you've got more Duke alumni than a New York consulting firm.
But ya know what, it isn't really the fault of our alumni either. Flying back into Durham to watch a Duke football game is like getting to flip the switch on your own execution-you may as well just pass. As a relatively small private school, we simply don't have a centralized fan base to fill out the cement bucket that is Wally Wade.
Just don't blame your absence on us.
Well, except Shane Battier.
UPON FURTHER REVIEW is a weekly column written by a sports columnist. It appears every Wednesday.
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