Senior quarterback Nate Sudfeld said IU has watched Duke practices and utilized schemes the Blue Devils use, because Duke is a model of the type of program Wilson wants to build.
It’s the blueprint for a disastrous football program coming out of the shadow of a blue-blood basketball program. This isn’t too different from what IU football has been trying to do.
“We’ve studied them from afar, the way they’ve developed their program,” Wilson said.
Now these two similar programs find themselves meeting Dec. 26 in the New Era Pinstripe Bowl, the first bowl appearance for the Hoosiers since 2007.
Five years — that’s how long it has taken Wilson to take IU from 1-11 to a 6-6 bowl team.
That’s the same amount of time it took Cutcliffe to build a bowl eligible team at Duke.
The Blue Devils won four combined games in the four seasons before Cutcliffe took over in Durham, North Carolina. It was arguably a situation even worse than what Wilson inherited in 2011.
Since then, Duke has been ranked in the AP Top-25 at some point in each of the last three seasons.
“What Coach Cutcliffe has done is one of the premiere jobs in the country,” Wilson said. “It’s no accident what he’s done.”
Wilson was a walk-on offensive lineman in the early 1980’s at North Carolina, Duke’s die-hard rival. He is familiar with the school he used to refer to as “the school eight miles away.”
But he said he respects Duke as a program and as a school. When he was still an assistant under Bob Stoops at Oklahoma, a Duke alumnus took Wilson and Stoops to a game versus North Carolina at Duke.
He was able to see Coach Mike Krzyzewski’s office and tour the Duke facilities.
“Even though I’m a Carolina guy, I’m like, ‘This is cool, I’m all in. I want to go see Coach K and his guys.,’” Wilson said.
Now, programs like Duke and North Carolina — traditional basketball schools — find themselves competing for ACC football titles and consistently in bowl games. Wilson says if a school is a great school, it should be great at a lot of things.
“To me Carolina was a great place, as is Duke, as is Indiana,” he said. “Great places ought to attract great people. We got facilities that we should be able to attract enough to be a competitive team. Our recruiting has shown it.”
Wilson considers Duke to be an example of what he wants IU to be. He said the recruiting he mentioned is starting to show as the Hoosiers have made their way to a bowl game this season.
Wilson said IU isn’t where he wants it to be, but it’s at a point where it’s competing with the best of the best and he wants to continue to push that.
Wilson might not be talking as gloriously about Duke in the days leading to his first bowl game with IU, but he will not be taking them lightly. Duke has been where IU is before.
“It’s going to be a strong, strong test,” Wilson said. “But I got a lot of respect for their program.”
