Wake Forest's Dave Clawson at Coaching Crossroad

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I’m feeling sadness and an unsettling sense of what may be next.

Why do things always have to change? Why can’t we just get comfortable with our lives and not be jolted and worry about what’s coming over the horizon that doesn’t feel controllable and feels like it’s going to cause us to become out of sync or maybe upend us somehow?

I am feeling this and asking these questions because of what I heard and saw during yesterday’s weekly press conference held by Wake Forest football coach Dave Clawson.

He said something I didn’t expect. For most of his coaching career, he said, he spent about 75 percent of his time coaching football, 20 percent recruiting, and the rest on administrative tasks.

Now he’s spending much less time coaching football, admitting he’s not nearly as involved in the team’s offensive and defensive schemes and coaching as he once was. Instead, he’s investing more time in recruiting talented players, fundraising, and dealing with all the structural and profound changes in his industry, college football.

The much discussed and highly emotionally charged transfer portal has made this college football business professional, pay for play, where players can offer their services to the highest bidders, leave a team at the end of any season, and join another – often lured by money.

For real. It’s as simple and greed-driven as that.

Dave talked about how tough it was last December when other teams offered some of his best players considerable money to transfer and his institution, Wake Forest, didn’t have the money to entice them to stay.

It felt slightly uncomfortable and unprecedented when he talked about how he feels better that this December he’ll have more money to offer his best players to stick around because the Wake Forest “collective” – a euphemism for football player money – has grown since then.

This is real change that is rocking the college football community daily. It felt as if he was asking me to donate money to his football program to help keep those good players or, he seemed to be implying, he won’t be able to keep them and the program won’t have good enough players and they’ll continue to lose more often.

A little out of place the statements felt, a college football coach signaling to all Wake Forest alumni he needs money to pay his players in order to win games, not explicitly but at least by tonal implication. Maybe this has been going on for decades, but it felt more staggering hearing it from an honorable, credible, and decent human being, Dave Clawson.

This got me thinking about all the other structural, product, and technology changes that I’ve seen, endured, suffered from, and, in some cases, benefited from, along with the companies that have risen and fallen across the tech industry landscape over the past three decades.

During the 1990s Nokia was the most powerful and hottest tech company for several years, but then along came the Apple iPhone, which was a better product, and Nokia fell off the mountain. Nokia didn’t adjust quickly enough to the obvious movement towards cell phones having Internet connectivity.

Again and again and again I, personally, have felt as if my industry has been shifting underneath me causing me chronic stomach aches and a sudden need for Extra Strength Excedrin Migraine pills.

The biggest concern I have now is being replaced by generative AI technology that can research and write articles much faster than I can and write just as well or better. The arrival of this juggernaut threat to replace me is on my mind daily and it’s motivating but also not a relaxing feeling. It’s worrying.

I’m guessing how I feel may be a bit like Dave feels about his job which is to win football games. He’s seeing patterns, downward-sloped trend lines, that will make that harder because other schools will likely throw down more money to pay to keep the most talented football players. I’m thinking of Alabama, Georgia, and Florida State.

It’s starting to settle in my mind, and I think Dave’s, that the future of Wake Forest football is probably going to be less win-filled the next five to ten years unless alumni donate tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to Dave so he can pay his best players to stay on his team and pay the most talented recruits hefty sums to join his team.

There’s also this honest question I have to ask myself as an avid fan of this football program. If I had a billion dollars, would I give tens or hundreds of millions to Dave so I could watch his team win often?

Have to say, no. Not because I would want to hoard the money, but because I just wouldn’t feel great about myself for paying money to help ensure my team wins lots of football games. In principle, it doesn’t sit right with me.

I like to see them win, but not because Dave buys the best players. The charm of his program is he wins without having the best players. It’s impressive the way he and his teams have overachieved. Playing the underdog role with stylistic class and dignity, not being expected to win much, and yet surprising everybody with how often they do, is what makes Wake Forest football alluring worthy of respect, and intriguing to watch. This is what makes being a fan of the program emotionally powerful.

If Dave got the money to pay better players, I would feel as if the team was winning because I and others paid for it. Buying wins doesn’t impress me as much as earning them through hard work, mental grit, and acumen, and just plain being tougher on the field without being faster or stronger or more athletic. I like it better when they win because they work hard and outsmart more talented teams.

Dave, it seems to me, has reached a crossroads in his career and he knows it. You can sense by his mannerisms and expressions of concern about the future of the program that he feels as if he’s losing control of his program, players, recruiting, his life, and everything he’s built so beautifully at Wake Forest before the transfer portal’s doors open wide for cash grabs all across America.

I wonder about this: I imagine he has or will have serious conversations with the President of Wake Forest, Susan Wente, about needing more money to continue producing a winning football program.

President Wente, I can imagine, will listen and seek to understand why he needs more money to win more games and maybe will be fully supportive of asking alumni for more donations to the football program, because she knows a winning football team is good for Wake Forest financially, all the while knowing the university has already been given some $120 million for football funding during Dave’s tenure.

It may occur to her, as it does to me, and may to you, that Dave may have to come back a year later and ask for more money saying the donations were generous but still not enough to pay players who are talented enough to keep the team winning.

Where does this need for money end? As long as players can get money for their services, they’ll likely keep asking for it but progressively pressuring coaches for more and more making Dave go to more press conferences and fundraisers asking for more donations, and telling the president he needs more and more money.

He’ll have to pay up or the winning will become less frequent, which will lower applications to Wake Forest, which will drop ticket sales to games, which will shrink the overall program’s finances.

It seems this need for more and more money isn’t sustainable for more than a couple of years. At some point, spending more money to win will not make sense to the university as a whole. The madness will have to have an endpoint. Someone will have to say: “We’ve spent enough money. If we lose more football games, we lose more football games.”

I think it’s plausible — and even probable — that Dave decides the situation is too much based on money, and that he’s not enjoying being mostly a fundraiser and not a football coach. It’s entirely conceivable that he will decide he’s just not enjoying what he’s doing anymore and, even though making millions of dollars himself, won’t enjoy waking up in the mornings to go to work because most of his day will be asking people for money – not coaching football, his true passion.

He’s caught in an amazing structural revolution across his industry that causes people to either leave for another university where there’s more money to pay players, or retire from the whole situation altogether, change careers, develop new skills, and travel the world. I could be wrong, but my sense is he’s getting fed up with the way the whole college football enterprise is operating and doesn’t like where things are headed because it will likely be to the detriment of his football program and job satisfaction.

Of course, I don’t know what he’s going to do. But I suspect based on how he’s been behaving and what he’s been saying during press conferences lately that he can see the future and it’s not a picture he likes.

We all have to adjust to these types of changes or get off the treadmill. Adjusting often means doing things more often you don’t want to do because you have to.

You can howl into the wind but usually, no one will be very sympathetic because they’ve got their own constantly changing lives to overcome themselves.

It’s called life. We all know this.

It takes maturity and toughness to confront the fact that your situation doesn’t look advantageous, and you need to exert more effort, and do uncomfortable and unpleasant things because you have to, move to another town, develop new skills, or change in ways you really don’t want to.

Life is always testing us, and this is often annoying. It requires us to adapt, be agile, learn more, exert more energy, and confront more of our inadequacies.

Dave finds himself in life’s raucous and rambunctious churn machine, and he’s grasping for something to hold onto that is elusive and may not be findable.

It’s odd seeing him in a subtle and indirect way, ask me as a fan, and you, for money.

This doesn’t feel right.

I hope it ends up well for him, you, me, and Wake Forest.

I have faith that it will – but I sure don’t know how.