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Duke needs football more than it once did, even if it’s not for money.
Back in the 1990s, the Duke athletic director, the late Tom Butters, said the school didn’t need to make a profit from football. Butters had hired championship coaches Mike Krzyzewski and Gail Goestenkors and turned the Iron Dukes from a break-even organization to a multi-million-dollar cash cow. So if football bombed, big deal.
Duke now has an Ivy League-type endowment that funds everything from academics to athletics, and in that process of getting rich figured out how to field a winning football team. David Cutcliffe started it, Mike Elko continued it well enough to be hired by Texas A&M and now it is Manny Diaz’s turn.
The latest from the constantly speculative rumor mill is that the SEC is courting Carolina AND Duke to the league and NOT Clemson and Florida State which, as written in this space, already have TV presence in South Carolina and Florida. What the SEC hasn’t had for 12 years is an NCAA champion in men’s basketball.
If Duke is willing to take the big payoff from the SEC, it could make a profit from football whether or not the Blue Devils ever win a game. And in the last two seasons, Elko has had them competitive every week on the way to bowls.
If these reports are true at any stage of negotiations, the first big meeting taking place would be about bringing the Duke-Carolina home-and-home series in basketball to the SEC with a completely new and separate national television contract. Like Notre Dame has in football. That would help turn our state into SEC Country.
The SEC already has Vanderbilt, which is generally average in football and would be a good annual opponent for the Dukies, who have already upgraded in the sport and might hold their own on the gridiron against everyone except Alabama and Georgia, Texas and Oklahoma.
There is supposedly a day approaching where the courts will make some kind of judgment about Clemson and FSU leaving the ACC, even if the Tigers and Seminoles have nowhere to go unless the Big Ten changes its tune about taking them.
Wherever all this settles, I am about saving the ACC. But if realignment happens, the Duke-Carolina thing makes sense because no one wants to lose the best basketball rivalry in the country, the only one that still matters during the regular season.
Featured image via Duke Athletics
Art Chansky is a veteran journalist who has written ten books, including best-sellers “Game Changers,” “Blue Bloods,” and “The Dean’s List.” He has contributed to WCHL for decades, having made his first appearance as a student in 1971. His “Sports Notebook” commentary airs daily on the 97.9 The Hill WCHL and his “Art’s Angle” opinion column runs weekly on Chapelboro.Chapelboro.com does not charge subscription fees, and you can directly support our efforts in local journalism here. Want more of what you see on Chapelboro? Let us bring free local news and community information to you by signing up for our newsletter.
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