Okay so Paulus will be long gone by the time this game ever happens, assuming the deal gets done, but it's about the best link I can think of between the two schools. Unless you also want to count our dominance over them in the NCAA Lacrosse Final Four this past season en route to our second-straight NATIONAL TITLE.
Cause you could count that too. If you wanted.
Duke football coach David Cutcliffe appeared on WFNZ recently to discuss the state of the program and the topic of future opponents came up. Rutgers' blog Bleed Scarlet took a listen and posted a transcript of the juicy stuff:
Cutcliffe: "Well we, we’re workong on a lot of them. We’ve got a lot of them done. You know, out to the future. We’re gonna be playing Stanford. We'll be playing Rutgers. Tryin’ to work out something with Syracuse. We have Tulane. We have Memphis. We are working on something with UCLA. We have Baylor. Lots of good games out there that are BCS conference teams. That’s one of the things that we’ve tried to do. We have Alabama by the way."
Okay so it's not concrete by any means but it sounds like we're talking. He seems much more confident about Rutgers as an opponent though. We seem to be in a weird place where the two of us are getting packaged together...coincidentally of course, but still odd.
I'd say that it doesn't excite me to hear we're trying to schedule Duke but I'm pretty sure Duke fans are thinking the same thing about us (they have football fans, right?). I guess a trip to Durham, NC isn't all that bad and who knows where either program will be by the time this happens, likely not anytime before 2013. And at the end of the day, it's theoretically a very winnable game against a BCS opponent. Who are we to sneeze at that right now?
Besides, we've got some revenge to take care of. The sting of our two losses to Duke in 1938 and 1939, in which we were outscored a combined 54-6 still burns deep. Never forget, guys.
H/T: Bleed Scarlet