Finding a name to match the game

It's good to be in on something from the ground floor," Tony narrated in the series premiere of The Sopranos all those years ago.

August 30 in Wallace Wade Stadium was the ground floor of the David Cutcliffe era of Duke Football. The Blue Devils' season-opening rout of James Madison-who hadn't taken a beating quite like that since a certain War of 1812-came complete with all sorts of fireworks: natural, artificial, metaphorical.

While standing in the bleachers-and standing is the operative word-for more than four hours, it was hard not to see a newfound enthusiasm rippling across the stands and onto the field. It was an interesting dynamic, as the fans so accustomed to the recently christened "relief of winning" across the path in Cameron reveled in the easier-than-expected dispatch of an overmatched foe for the first win in Wally Wade since 2005.

One other thing was evident: students were being creative and winging it. For football games, there aren't any customs, no set times for cheers, no cohesion. So students pulled bits and pieces from Cameron rhetoric, with other parts, like pushups for points and keys for kickoffs, taken from other schools.

But like I said, it was just the ground floor-one that's sure to be under construction all season long. Saturday night was a bump in the road, but a reassuring one, as the Blue Devils played their most exciting home contest since the week before Ron Artest showed Detroit how fannnnnn-tastic the NBA can be in 2004.

One thing, though, was clear. Now, with new, even-more-like-the-Indianapolis-Colts uniforms, a second scoreboard and even a jacked-up mascot, it's time for the so-called Wade Wackos to become something more.

And so I sat in my room all week, staring at my poster of Carl Linnaeus in an attempt to placate this need for new nomenclature.

The first part of any hypothesis is to discredit previous conclusions. Wade Wackos? Unacceptable. Wasn't Wackos the name of an XFL team? (No, that was the Memphis Maniax, but you get the point.)

Besides, tying ourselves to a coach is a precarious proposition (see: Roof's Rough Riders). If we've learned anything at Duke over the past decade, it's that our football coaches tend toward the ephemeral.

I turned to the nickname; the Blue Devil should lend itself to a pithy title. But Devil's Den? The Inferno? Both taken. And this season, the Tampa Bay Rays have taught us that less Devil equals more Ws.

And so I was left with Blue. The Blue Crew? Childish. The Blue Zone? Too loaded.

I was desperate, and so I did what any well-meaning student would do at a desperate time: I tried to plagiarize. I Googled "college football student sections," only to make the stunning if delayed discovery that most of them don't even have names.

Don't believe me? What do they call the student section at Florida? Michigan? Clemson?

The Gators have The Swamp, Michigan The Big House, Clemson Death Valley. It became clear that the students weren't defined; the experience was. And so you go Between the Hedges at Georgia and shout "War Eagle!" at Auburn. The thing they have in common? They all look great on a T-shirt.

Identities, then, like compounds, are better when they're organic and not, well, inorganic. To define the experience at Wally Wade two weeks into the new regime would be like hanging a "Mission: Accomplished" banner over the entrance. I mean, it even took six months before the Reign of Terror was recognized as such, and if you ask Robespierre, it was a pretty terrifying reign from the start.

The bottom line is that the Blue Devils need to beat up on more than James Madison before we christen ourselves. At the same time, it's our chance to be there from the ground floor, to be the first of whatever we eventually call ourselves, to be Johnny Boy.

Setting the tone and winning games come first. Then who knows? Maybe a cool name will come Out of the Blue.

Now wouldn't that look cool on a T-shirt?