Helping Florida State Overcome Haunting Wake Forest Memories

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Dear Florida State Football Team,

This weekend’s game should be easy, just one more routine grass gallop on your way to a national football championship.

Everybody knows it’s not a fair match-up, but the rules say you have to show up in Winston-Salem on Saturday and dispose of Wake Forest. Your team is more talented. In the off-season, your squad hauled in many more four and five-stars from the transfer portal than Wake Forest.

You’re thinking right now that it’s a lock that you’re going to win going away. The outcome will be decided by halftime. A busy day for second stringers.

You’ve even allowed yourself to think that it would make more sense to just cancel the trip from Tallahassee to Winston-Salem, save the travel expenses, and prepare for better opponents because, really, your opponent doesn’t even belong on the same field as you guys. And never has, well, a few exceptions.

You’re ranked fourth in America. Wake Forest isn’t ranked boo.

This is simple math. You beat Clemson earlier this season and Wake didn’t. You’re unbeaten and Wake has three losses.

Everybody knows, if they’re being honest with themselves, that you guys are so elite that you really are too good for the Atlantic Coast Conference. You have been righteous but also correct in asserting you belong in the SEC.

You’ve always been a football blue-blood powerhouse. Well, almost always. Except for the past few years but those were aberrations. No one remembers last year, or the year before that, or the year before that.

Especially not your team. Especially not Wake Forest football fans.

Many people think, and your entire team thinks, you’ve got a shot to land a bid in the College Football Playoff among the four teams competing for a national championship.

It’s right within your grasp and you know it. You can smell being in that high-profile game. Realistically, nothing of note stands between you and that football bliss.

All you have to do is win every game for the rest of the regular season. Shouldn’t be too tough. Wake Forest doesn’t scare you, no horrors or horrible memories with them, well, mostly not.

You figure you’ll get up big on them early cruise to a win and fly back to Florida one step closer to an immortal football season.

Everything is lining up as your team drew it up before the season. Well, almost everything. There’s just one small little thing nagging at each one of you. Nothing big really, just a black and gold ghost dressed up like a Deacon flying around your face that you keep having to swat away that comes back once, then a second time, then a third.

Ghosts are just ghosts, not real. But those ghosts, there’s something about them that irks you. They won’t go away. In your dark bedrooms late at night when no one’s around, you think about them more often than you would like to admit but don’t tell anyone. In private each one of you has wished those ghosts would just disappear and your memories of them would be erased.

They’re kind of small, really. Not many people across America really know about or even care about them, but they’re still there, flying around Allegacy Field in Winston-Salem, in black and gold football uniforms.

Black and gold ghosts.

You know what these ghosts are though you may not want to be thinking about them this week. Not this week. It won’t help you. They can only haunt you the way Halloween will be haunting all of us in six days. Don’t be haunted.

What are these ghosts? Well, it’s just that, you know, something has happened last year, and the year before that, and the year before that.

Three straight years the same thing, the same ghosts you haven’t been able to shoo away. I can’t be sure but I’m pretty sure you know what I’m alluding to.

One of the scariest ghosts is what happened last year when Wake Forest went into Tallahassee for a football game. Bad memory, isn’t it?

A battalion of ghosts that Wake Forest football team is, aren’t they?

Last year your quarterback was sort of right but not well positioned to say after that game that, well, you guys lost but Florida State has more talent. A more talented team losing to a less talented team is sad, ghostly, and haunting. Not the most impressive thing and even less so to claim you’re better after losing. Sort of a classless comment claim but it was an emotional time. We’re sympathetic about what scares you.

Regardless, the same thing won’t happen again. A fourth straight loss to Wake Forest – that would be unfathomable, unthinkable, unforgivable, unprecedented, and 10 other words that begin with “un.”

Everyone’s sure you superstars won’t let that catastrophe crush your championship. To rattle his nerves, you’ll blitz Wake’s third-string quarterback endlessly and bull rushes up the middle every play. You’ll sack him all game long. It’s how to beat Wake.

But what if he hands the ball off on just about every play so you won’t have time to get to him? You’ll hold them to forty-one-yard gains, a tidal wave of three and outs, and make them punt. Punting will feel to you like Wake’s offensive strategy.

And your offense will scamper up and down the field as it pleases because you raided the portal and stockpiled guys who run under 4.4 40-yard dashes. Except that, well, maybe the Wake Forest defense is a little better than you think. They held Clemson’s offense effectively. But you’re not Clemson. We all appreciate and worship you because you’re fabulous Florida State. You’re back. You’re better than Clemson again. Give you your due.

Let not your hearts be troubled by the weak Wake offense. They’ll just keep running the ball and punting. They may try a few passes but you’ll easily stop those, probably snag three or four pics, and force a few fumbles.

Game over.

Hey, word is out Wake Forest doesn’t have much of a passing attack. Third-stringers aren’t ringers. How good can he be?

Nobody knows except for one little thing that isn’t that important so nothing to really pay much attention to, but with the game on the line last Saturday he made a game-winning pass in a drive with all the pressure on Earth resting on his Great Santino Italian Stallion shoulders.

But you’re absolutely right: he won’t be able to work that magic again. He had his moment. It could never happen again. Football gods will haunt him.

You, Florida State, could never possibly be haunted by ghosts of Wake Forest football games of seasons recent. You’re looking ahead. You’ve shoved all that embarrassing agony in your rearview mirror and heaved that mirror into your psychological trash dumpster.

Your heads and eyes are straight to the front. You don’t feel uneasy about Saturday’s game. Not a chance.

How could you? Why would you?

You’re just so much better than Wake Forest. And always have been. And always will be.

Except for the past three years.

But that’s just three straight years.