Originally Posted by
jimsumner
I can also confirm budwom's recollections. In fact, I believe we may have been together on the main quad one Saturday evening after an especially bad Duke loss. Combine anger, alcohol, testosterone and really large human beings, and it can become very unpleasant.
I do think the decline of Duke football beginning in the middle-1960s is a bit more nuanced than Ivy League academics and their disdain for football, although that certainly was a big factor.
There are at least two other factors.
Duke football was at its best in a period with limited substitution, when players played on both sides of the ball and you could dominate with two dozen or so top players. When substitution limits were dispensed with, the equation changed. Specialization became the norm and Duke needed to recruit more good players than it could recruit. It might be a coincidence that Duke stopped winning titles when the game became two-platoon. But I suspect not.
Then there was desegregation. For a variety of socio-economic reasons, Duke simply wasn't viewed as congenial for African American athletes in the 1970s. K only had two black players as recently as 1982, his second season in Durham.
Duke recruited some great football players in those days. Guys like Steve Jones, Carl McGee, Mike Dunn and Billy Bryan could have gone anywhere. Duke just couldn't recruit the depth it needed to be more than a .500 team.