About Duke University Football

According to legend, Duke's longtime athletic director and basketball coach Eddie Cameron sat down with football coach Wallace Wade in 1935 to drum up plans for a new indoor stadium. Throughout the meeting, the two doodled plans for the arena on the back of—what else?—a matchbook. If true, the apocryphal tale makes a fitting story for Duke, considering the university itself was founded partly on a fortune from North Carolina's prized tobacco industry.

Little could the men know at the time, but that brainchild, Cameron Indoor Stadium, would become a symbol of Duke's success over the years, in both basketball and athletics in general. Combined, the men's and women's hoops teams have collected more than 1,200 wins in front of home crowds, whose notoriously raucous cheers make it nearly impossible for visiting athletes to write their term papers on the sidelines. Steps away, Wallace Wade Stadium has stood tall since 1929, becoming the only venue outside of Pasadena, California, to host college football's iconic Rose Bowl game, back in 1942.