Mark Twain famously said that history never repeats itself but it sometimes rhymes.
Good enough for me. If you know me, you know I never miss a chance to take a trip in the Wayback Machine, especially if it concerns Duke sports.
If you don’t know me, I never miss a chance to take a trip in the Wayback Machine, especially if it concerns Duke sports.
Beginning his second season as head coach at Duke Mike Elko has a chance to do things no Duke football coach has ever done. And his team can start by doing something no Duke team has ever done.
Elko had a great first season last year. Not many Duke coaches have had great first seasons. Not even the ones you think might have.
Now, I consider modern Duke football to start in 1929 when Duke joined the Southern Conference. If you’re a big fan of Herman Steiner, well, I’m sorry. Steiner coached Trinity to a 7-2-1 mark in 1922, with wins over Hampden-Sydney, Randolph-Macon and Oglethorpe, among others. This was Steiner’s first season as head football coach. It also was his last. His main job was director of physical education and intramurals. In fact, Trinity/Duke had six head coaches in the first six years after re-instituting football in 1920.
Since then Duke has had 15 head football coaches. Only two won more than five games in their first season and only four ended their Duke tenure with more wins than loses. The Venn diagram doesn’t have any overlap.
But those top Duke coaches who had ho-hum first seasons at Duke had much better second seasons. The great Wallace Wade lost his first game at Duke to South Carolina, 7-0. His first team went 5-3-2. His second team went 7-3, his third 9-1. Eddie Cameron was head coach only during World War II, so I’m not sure anything he did has a modern comparison. But for the record he went 5-4-1 in 1942, 8-1 in 1943.
Wade came back from WWII a changed man and labored through five seasons of relative mediocrity before retiring after the 1950 season. He was replaced by Bill Murray, who went 5-4-1 in 1951 and followed that with 8-2 in his second season.
Now, if you know your Duke history you know that this almost four-decade span constituted the high-water mark of Duke football, a period when Duke was a nationally elite program. Starting with Jimmie DeHart’s last season in 1930 and ending with Murray’s last season, 1965, Duke went 236-99-19 and only had three losing seasons.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to JimSumnerSports to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.