n late August, there is still a feeling of anticipation for fans of Duke football. When the season is young, they come to Wallace Wade Stadium holding on to a hope that this season will be different. Unlikely heroes will emerge. The sum of the team will be greater than the whole. The magic of 1989 and 1994 will be recaptured.

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That was the atmosphere on a warm, August evening early in the 2002 season as the Blue Devils prepared to take on the Louisville Cardinals. The crowd stirred with excitement. Voices rose in eager chatter and, now and again, clusters of people erupted in laughter. The roar from the crowd when the Duke players ran out of the tunnel and onto the field was more than just a reflex action. There was a sense of possibility about this game and this Duke team. The Blue Devils had just snapped their twenty-three-game losing streak with a stunning upset of East Carolina the week before, and now both the curious and the true believers were out to see if maybe, just maybe, Duke football had something new to offer.

It didn’t take long for Louisville to dampen those feelings. The Cardinals’ defense smothered each Duke possession, and Louisville’s star quarterback, Dave Ragone, methodically picked apart the Blue Devils’ defense.

Eventually, the boisterous crowd grew silent. It became easier to notice that large sections of the stadium were still empty, despite the exciting win the week before. Those who stayed until the end of the rout—those who really, deeply cared—were left with the same questions they’d had almost every season for the last three decades.

Will Duke ever be able to field a truly competitive Division I football program? What will it take for the Blue Devils to reach that level? And will the price of football success be worth paying?

Dramatic reach: diving for the pigskin Photo: Jon Gardiner

Now, almost a year later, with the Atlantic Coast Conference on the verge of adding the University of Miami and Virginia Tech and becoming a football super-conference, those questions seem even more pertinent. In recent months, Duke has made moves—seismic shifts to some, baby steps to others—toward improving its chances of competing in Division I football. The Harold “Spike” Yoh Football Center, a $22-million, 70,000-square-foot structure paid for as part of the Campaign for Duke, opened its doors last fall. A gleaming new structure filled with offices, meeting rooms, an indoor practice field, and a spacious weight room, the Yoh Center was meant to serve as physical proof that Duke was taking its football program seriously.

At the same time, Duke announced that it was making changes in its admissions process for football players. Administrators were at pains to make clear that the university was not lowering its admissions standards for recruits—rather, it was giving coach Carl Franks a few more opportunities each year to bring in players whose academic qualifications were on the bottom end of Duke’s admissions spectrum.

“ We’re not asking them to stretch any further,” says Duke athletics director Joe Alleva. “They’re not going to stretch any further. What we’re asking them to do is to admit more kids at that level.”

What those changes will mean to Duke—to the university and to its football program—is the foundation of an ongoing debate with a central question: Can big-time football and big-time academics co-exist at Duke?

To Franks ’83, who played for the Blue Devils football teams from 1980-1982, the investments now being made in the football program are long overdue. “It wasn’t a priority,” he says. “It wasn’t a priority as some people thought it should be. As I thought it should be.” By Franks’ reasoning, that lack of commitment really came back to haunt Duke when Florida State entered the Atlantic Coast Conference in 1992. In the quarter-century before the arrival of the Seminoles, the Blue Devils hadn’t had much success, but they’d at least had a chance at respectability. That all changed once the conference brought in one of the nation’s football powerhouses.

“ Here was big powerful Florida State, that had all these advantages, that had all these great athletes,” Franks says. “Now everybody in the conference says, ‘If we’re going to compete in this conference, we’ve got to catch up.’ ”