Jacobs: Insanity Trumps Reason at Duke

WRAL.com columnist Barry Jacobs questions whether the latest change at Duke will make any real difference.

Posted 3:33 p.m. Nov 27, 2007 — Updated 1:18 a.m. Nov 28, 2007

Barry Jacobs

No less a thinker than Albert Einstein noted that insanity consists of “doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.”

Duke football advocates, take note.

The Duke program, once respected nationally for its fearsome Iron Dukes (players, not folks with plenty of disposable income), slid from football’s front ranks two generations ago with the retirement of Hall of Fame coach Bill Murray and the advent of two-platoon football.

Since then, the Blue Devils haven’t just stumbled, they’ve fallen through the earth’s crust. Duke has enjoyed eight winning seasons in football over the 42 years since Murray left. That’s a frequency of less than one winning mark every five years, or twice per decade. Per decade. Over a span of more than four decades.

This qualifies as more than a slump or a trend. This is a fact of life. And most of those losing seasons came before the ACC added Virginia Tech, Boston College, and Miami. Not to mention Florida State in 1992.

Even Duke’s winning records don’t amount to much – since 1966, only three Duke squads won seven or more games. Two of those escapes from mediocrity came in 1988 and 1989 under Steve Spurrier, the only Blue Devil coach of the nine since Murray to post a winning record at the school (20-13-1).

In other words, Duke can hire and fire all the coaches it wants. Cognoscente can debate the importance of bringing in someone with head coaching experience – like, say, past Duke busts Tom Harp, Mike McGee, Steve Sloan, Red Wilson, and Fred Goldsmith. Advocates can point to Wake Forest’s remarkable success under Jim Grobe, and urge belief that lightning will strike twice.

And administrators with the vision of fog-bound glaucoma victims wearing sunglasses can prattle on about returning Duke football to competitive status in the ACC.

“The coach is the key, with the right budgets and the right facilities," Duke athletics director Joe Alleva said upon firing Ted Roof yesterday. Among those facilities is Wallace Wade Stadium, which Alleva observed “hasn’t been updated in 75 years.” Who knew that the electronic scoreboard and the air-conditioned sports medicine facility/press box dated to the early 1930s?

The continued insistence that some different result can be conjured in defiance of history and common sense is more than silly. The belief in competitive salvation by hiring the perfect coach, paying the right salaries, building sufficiently gaudy facilities, and recalibrating the academic requirements, would surely strike Dr. Einstein as a form of institutional insanity.

Ted Roof, a good man fired after four losing seasons, is the latest victim of this malaise, which permeates collegiate athletics. Some see jettisoning Roof as a sign Duke is taking football seriously. Others might say it shows Duke has joined the mob that places winning, revenue streams, and popular acclaim above such old-fashioned notions as honoring contracts and providing enjoyable competitive experiences for student-athletes.

If ever a program cried out for fresh thinking, it’s Duke. If ever a program should drop to football’s Division I-AA (now called the Championship Subdivision), it’s Duke. Does anyone really think it’s fun for players to lose every time to Florida State or Virginia Tech, schools at which football is a form of worship?

Don’t believe the argument that Duke, one of the best-endowed universities in the country, cannot afford to lose its share of the ACC football swag derived from TV and bowl games. Grant fewer scholarships and draw bigger crowds to watch a competitive team, and Duke would have far less to subsidize, anyway.

There is no way the ACC would eject Duke if the school petitioned to drop a notch in football. The conference would not dare lose Duke basketball, let alone the school’s other nationally competitive sports. You know the Big East, savaged during the ACC’s 2003 expansion, would gladly accept Duke into a fold that includes Providence, Georgetown, Villanova, St. John’s, Seton Hall, DePaul, and Marquette, front rank in most sports besides BS football.

But the red meat crowd can rest easy. At Duke there’s only a hollow me-too mentality.

The Blue Devils thus join their favorite rival, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, in meekly succumbing to the ambient insanity.

Last year UNC hired a big-name head coach, Butch Davis. He began touting increased spending on football facilities even before his first Tar Heel squad played a game at Kenan Stadium. Hitched to Davis’ wagon, panicky school leaders responded to hints and whispers the coach might in fact be a hired gun by boosting his compensation to more than $2 million annually.

Such results were predictable, of course, once the ACC chose to expand, placing greater emphasis on the single sport that requires the most spending and tends most to reward the biggest schools. Surely it’s no coincidence that SMU and Baylor, schools similar to Duke, axed their football coaches on the same day Roof was blown off.

“This business is very results-oriented,” said Duke’s Alleva. Not entirely. The AD was recently given a five-year contract extension, neatly sidestepping the professional consequences of hiring two failed football coaches and scandals involving baseball (steroids) and men’s lacrosse (illegal and excessive partying, if nothing else).

But let’s take Alleva’s statement at face value, even if he applied it to Roof’s four wins in four years rather than to his own performance.

Alleva has had 10 years on the job, and so far has failed to hire a single African-American as a head coach or in a major decision-making position in his department. Duke has certainly enjoyed the benefits of recruiting black athletes, but has yet to hire a black head coach in any sport.

Much was made of a new outlook at Duke in the wake of the lacrosse fiasco. Let’s see if, unlike the athletics directors at North Carolina and N.C. State when they hired Davis and Tom O’Brien, respectively, Alleva seriously considers black candidates. If Duke insists on insanity, at least it can be inclusive about it.

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