Duke, ACC, & football

http://www.newsobserver.com/sports/college/acc/duke/article99589157.html

"Until recently the university exhibited a tacit – some would say healthy – ambivalence toward the athletic arms race consuming college programs in elite conferences. But visitors to Duke’s West Campus this past Saturday for the Blue Devils’ 2016 home football opener against N.C. Central saw an historic departure – an emphatic and enthusiastic embrace of the accouterments of big-time sports.
Supporters of Duke athletics have rushed to fund a vision that’s been almost a decade in reaching fruition, embodied in a 2008 blueprint modestly titled “Unrivaled Ambition: A Strategic Plan for Duke Athletics.” An athletic fundraising effort launched in 2012 sought a quarter of a billion dollars to realize the plan’s goals. Already it’s brought in a staggering $350 million, $100 million beyond its original target, with 11 months to go in the campaign."

Spending on football

"Certainly it’s grown. In virtually one gulp, Duke has added a quarter of a million square feet of new structures at its athletic core. That square footage doesn’t count numerous Olympic sport improvements, among them a new East Campus softball stadium for Duke’s 27th team. Thanks to the ongoing fundraising effort, many Olympic sports anticipate an infusion of scholarship support, presently a $21 million annual athletic department expense at $70,000 per head. Olympic athletes are already using their own 13,000-square-foot workout and training facility in the new Brooks Center across the plaza from Cameron.
A 30,000-square-foot addition to Cameron expanded the lobby and hospitality space, and administrative offices moved to Brooks after 75 years of coexistence with basketball. “It’s not an office building trying to be an athletic facility anymore,” Cragg says.
The key change, though, reflects realities beyond campus. Where once basketball drove TV revenues, particularly for the ACC, now the preponderance of income is derived from football. Top-notch facilities and support, matched by a quality coach such as David Cutcliffe, are seen as prerequisites to consistent relevance in a Power Five conference.
“We had to be a legitimate player in football,” Cragg says. “The previous model of Duke athletics probably didn’t work in the modern world by relying on one sport, being basketball. We’re unique in that – most schools are built around football.”
In fact, Duke was built around football, its teams nationally prominent from 1930 through the ACC’s early years. More recently the school became a laggard in football spending, its coaches’ salaries at the bottom of the ACC as the Blue Devils endured a run of 17 losing records in 18 seasons under four different men prior to Cutcliffe’s well-timed arrival in December 2007. The strategic plan adopted four months later succinctly targeted the need to “change the culture of the entire program” in football.
Duke had voted in vain with North Carolina in 2003 against league expansion that brought in Boston College, Miami and Virginia Tech and enhanced the ACC’s football orientation. Soon afterward Duke was engulfed by a scandal involving a party-prone men’s lacrosse squad, an unethical prosecutor and a dissembling and disturbed young woman whose accusations were ultimately discredited. The mess riveted national attention in 2006 and 2007, much to Duke’s detriment.
Cragg says the painful episode drove the school to reappraise, spurring the formulation of its 38-page strategic plan in 2008. “We were at a low point here,” Cragg concedes. “I think it forced us, and I say that in a healthy way, it forced us to look at ourselves and our university to look at athletics.”
The plan parochially cited 1992 improvements to football facilities at UNC as precipitating “a tidal wave that swept across the ACC.” More germane, that same year Florida State, a football colossus, had joined the conference with the promise its presence would lift all boats. Instead FSU immediately dominated, finishing first for nine straight seasons with a combined 70-2 league record. That sparked a competitive spending spree that hasn’t abated since.