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A year ago, Thaddeus Lewis was an eighteen-year-old freshman unexpectedly catapulted into the high-visibility, high-pressure role of quarterback when teammate Zack Asack was suspended for plagiarism. (Asack returned to school this fall.) Lewis had been a star at Hialeah-Miami Lakes Senior High School in Florida his senior year, was named the sixty-fifth best high-school quarterback in the country by Scout.com, and had been aggressively recruited by universities like Michigan State and Pittsburgh. But calling the play in the first huddle of his college career against Wake Forest, Lewis was understandably nervous.
"I was trying to be a leader to people who were older and more experienced than me," says Lewis. "It was difficult."
Duke would go on to lose to the Demon Deacons 13-14 that hot September Saturday. But from the confident, glass-half-full perspective of the players, there are many reasons to focus on the positive. Two games last year were decided by only one point, including the one against Wake Forest, which went on to play in the Orange Bowl. And this year's team is deeper and more seasoned: Duke is the only ACC team to return all eleven offensive starters from last year; on defense, five players return including sophomore Vince Oghobaase, whose freshman performance earned him All-America and All-ACC honors after logging twenty-eight tackles.
Still, even though Lewis' freshman performance was remarkable—he connected on 180 of 340 attempted passes to set a new freshman record of 2,134 yards and eleven touchdowns—he and his teammates know that they have an uphill battle to return Duke football to its former luster as a bowl-worthy team. The last time that happened was in 1995, when Duke lost to Wisconsin in the Hall of Fame Bowl.
Lewis, who was reared by a single mother in a poor, inner-city Miami neighborhood known as Opa-Locka, has already proved skeptics wrong. "A lot of people didn't expect me to make it out" of Opa-Locka, says Lewis. "Where I grew up, I saw people making bad decisions and going after easy money. I was determined to get out of the neighborhood and be somebody."
With college recruiters showing up at his high-school games and wooing him with offers, Lewis had his choice of colleges. Why then did he choose Duke, which had fared poorly in recent years, and where basketball, not football, was king? "I had a great visit to Duke and really liked the people here," says Lewis, recalling how students had hung a spray-painted bed sheet from a West Campus dorm window that read, "Thad Lewis, Duke Wants You!"
He also liked the idea of helping to turn around a struggling program,
rather than playing a minor role with a pigskin powerhouse. But what really sold Lewis was the shining lure of a Duke degree, a sentiment voiced by many of his fellow players. "I knew I needed to have a fallback plan once the football deflates."
Even though Lewis has high hopes for going pro after college, he knows that his Duke diploma is more likely to be the key to long-term professional success. His teammate senior Patrick Bailey, who's winding up his undergraduate coursework in electrical and computer engineering, echoes Lewis' ambitions. "I'll see how far football can take me," says Bailey, a defensive end who was recruited by Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, among others. Eventually, though, he's got his sights set on an engineering career that focuses on digital or linear control systems.
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