Groundhog Day keeps happening over and over for Duke football — it’s enough to make Bill Murray mad.
No, not THAT Bill Murray… the other one.
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Before Caddyshack and Ghostbusters; before The Royal Tenenbaums and Lost in Translation; before Bill Murray established himself as one of the great comic actors of our time, another Bill Murray did something extremely rare: He won a bowl game at Duke.
As current coach David Cutcliffe leads the Blue Devils into Saturday’s 2015 Pinstripe Bowl against Indiana, he carries the weight of a bowl victory drought in Durham, North Carolina, one which stretches back to the 1960 season and January 2, 1961. For a long time (over 15 years, going back to the mid-1990s), Duke didn’t make bowl games at all, but each of the past three seasons, Cutcliffe has guided the program into the postseason spotlight; gained leverage at some point in the fourth quarter of Duke’s bowl game; and lost.
Cincinnati in 2012. Texas A&M in 2013. Arizona State in 2014. In at least one point of the fourth quarter in those three games, Duke had — if not an advantage — an opportunity to take control of a 50-50 game. Somehow, in through three very different plot twists, the Blue Devils lost. As a result, Duke’s bowl victory drought continues… which leads us to the other Bill Murray.
Let’s take a little time to know this man, as Duke tries to make history in New York against Indiana.
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It is instructive to note that the 1961 Cotton Bowl was not an isolated moment of achievement for Murray. He won the 1955 Orange Bowl against Nebraska and then lost the 1958 Orange Bowl to Oklahoma and Bud Wilkinson, whose Sooners had their 47-game winning streak snapped during the 1957 season. You can see that Murray’s first two New Year’s Day bowl appearances were spaced three seasons apart. Sure enough, the Duke coach was able to lead the Devils back to the big stage on the three-year plan, in 1960.
Duke earned a Cotton Bowl berth against Arkansas and a coach you might have heard of: Frank Broyles, for whom the Broyles Award is named. Broyles won the national title in 1964 at Arkansas, and he went on to become the longtime athletic director in Fayetteville while also carving out a reputation as one of the great color commentators in college football television history. His partner was the equally legendary Keith Jackson.
Before Broyles’s reputation grew, however, his Hogs were bested by Murray and Duke in Dallas.
In the most significant encounter between the two schools until the 1990 Final Four national semifinals in Denver, Duke’s defense had the right plan in place for Arkansas’s do-everything superstar, Lance Alworth. Before becoming an all-time great receiver in the AFL with the San Diego Chargers, and then winning a Super Bowl in the NFL with the Dallas Cowboys, Alworth played multiple positions for the 1960 Razorbacks and became Broyles’s most dangerous weapon. Murray and his defensive staff clearly did their homework, containing Alworth to the extent that Duke allowed a single touchdown — and nothing else — to the Hogs over the course of 60 minutes. Duke blocked the extra point, enabling a fourth-quarter touchdown and PAT to give the Blue Devils an immensely satisfying win.
When Bill Murray coached Duke, the Blue Devils were an ACC power. Duke won four outright ACC titles during Murray’s tenure, and shared two other conference crowns. Murray coached in Durham for 15 seasons, from 1951 through 1965. He suffered only two losing seasons in that span of time.
Murray’s accomplishments speak for themselves — his coaching prowess is unassailable. Yet, Murray stood on the shoulders of an even greater coach, the man who built Duke football into a national power, with Murray sustaining the Blue Devils’ winning ways for a decade and a half.
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Wallace Wade (above, in retirement) is one of the giants of college football coaching.
It’s hard to put him on the list of the top 10 coaches who have ever lived, but a space surely exists for him in the top 30.
Realize this about Wade: His 1925 Alabama team permanently transformed not just the Crimson Tide, but the long evolutionary arc of Southern football as a whole. Wade won three national championships and 10 conference titles. As the coach of Duke, the stadium which today bears his name hosted the 1942 Rose Bowl just weeks after the attack on Pearl Harbor rendered Pasadena, California, unsafe for the game. Wade’s impact on college football is not easy to adequately measure. He made Duke a destination program, a place where someone as skilled as Murray could easily take over and thrive for many more years.
Between Wade and Murray, Duke hit the coaching jackpot twice, making the Blue Devils an enduring force in college football in the middle third of the 20th century.
Consider this: From the start of Wade’s tenure in 1931 (he didn’t coach during the heart of World War II) through the end of Murray’s tenure in 1965, Duke endured only three losing seasons (out of 35).
In that span of time, the Blue Devils reached a New Year’s Day bowl twice as many times (6) as the number of losing seasons the program had (3).
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You never knew how good Duke football once was, did you?
Well, now you do… which is why it would mean so much to longtime Duke fans to see this bowl victory drought of nearly 55 years come to an end on Saturday.
Bill Murray would want his name to no longer be so prominent in Duke football history. That name and its prominence ought to exist solely for what Murray and his teams achieved, not for the absence of achievements which has followed.
