NEW YORK—Duke administrators joined with officials from Indiana and the New York Yankees for a pregame press conference at Yankee Stadium Saturday.
Despite the hectic scheduling around the holiday season, the Pinstripe Bowl—now in its sixth year at Yankee Stadium—will have another strong turnout.
“We’ve sold over 35,000 tickets, which is really terrific since this is the first time we’ve had the game the day after Christmas,” Yankees president Randy Levine said.
Duke President Richard Brodhead thanked the Yankee organization for the opportunity to play in a historic city, one that is home to plenty of Duke alumni. The Blue Devils sold out their ticket allotment for Saturday's bowl game with a few days to spare.
“New York is a great Duke city. We have more than 25,000 alums that live within an hour of here,” Brodhead said. “New York very much remains the capital city [of the United States]—the capital of finance, the capital of culture, the capital of food, the capital of everything people look to. How fun for our players to spend a week having the gates to the city thrown open for their education.”
For Duke Vice President and Director of Athletics Kevin White, the city of New York is not the only well-respected entity on display this week.
“This is the perfect confluence of some real, if I may say, of world-class brands,” White said. “We very much look forward to playing in this football game, and as Dr. Brodhead said, ‘May the best team win,’ White said. “We just hope like hell it’s Duke.”
Some have criticized the bowl for selecting two schools that are neither regional nor football powerhouses to play at Yankee Stadium, but the two schools are very similar—both are traditional basketball powerhouses with resurgent football teams, a fact not lost on the Indiana brass.
Playing its first bowl game since 2007, Indiana is taking notes from the blueprint for success laid out by Duke head coach David Cutcliffe in Durham, N.C. Although Duke is 0-3 in bowls in the last three years, Hoosier Vice President and Director of Athletics Fredd Glass said he thinks Duke has blazed the trail for his program to follow.
“We’ve often said, and I’ll mention it again, that Duke football has formed a bit of a model for where Indiana football wants to go,” Glass said.
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