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Figured you would want me to lay it all out in print exactly how the Wake Forest football team will rebound from its 4 and 8 season last Fall, go undefeated, and win the national title.
The Demon Deacons open on August 29 – 16 days from now – at home against the North Carolina A&T Aggies. It should be a good game. Lots of pomp and circumstance. The Demon Deacon will ride out on his motorcycle and the team will run onto the field and the jumbotron will play some cool songs during commercial timeouts that I’ll dance to but get winded and have to sit down. I’ll be eating some food and sitting in the stands or maybe the press box where cheering is frowned upon.
The Deacs will score first on a touchdown pass to Taylor Morin. The Aggies will be overwhelmed by the raucous home atmosphere and the Deacons will prevail, 28-7.
Rolling into Week 2 against Virginia – also a home game – Wake will be ready for this in-conference rival with some cool delayed run pass option mesh by the new quarterback I like to call the California Kid. Everybody will be talking about this kid from California coming into Winston-Salem – all the way across America – to lead the squad. He’ll hurl a touchdown pass to Donovan Green and Demond Claiborne will go for 127 yards on 14 carries. A couple of sacks by Dylan Hazen will be key.
Virginia will be a stiff test and highly motivated having lost to Wake the past several seasons in football. They’ll want payback but won’t get it. They’ll get an “L” in the loss column. Wake will win by eight points but I’m not comfortable predicting the exact score.
Ole Miss will stampede into Winston-Salem strutting all its SEC pompous credentials and will assume they’ll routinely take one and head back to Louisiana flying high in the cirrus clouds. They’ll look wicked slick because they have the most stylish and beautifully designed football helmet in the history of football. You’ve seen it: Ole Miss in script. I’ll be totally enamored and fixated on the gorgeousness of their helmets so much so that I won’t be able to concentrate on the game like I usually do to an extreme extent. I’ll also be distracted by Lane Kiffin on the sideline coaching his team loaded with five-star athletes, being all self-assured that there’s no way he’s going to lose to Wake Forest.
But as the day goes on he’ll become increasingly miserable because Wake will play better than he expects. Coach Dave Clawson will tell his team before the game that if they beat Ole Miss they’ll be on their way to an undefeated national title season. He will be so convincing in his assertion his players will believe him and go on to edge Kiffin’s guys by five points. Hazen will recover a fumble.
Feeling haughty they can be teams from Louisiana after taking down Ole Miss, Wake will ruin another Saturday for a Louisiana team, this time in week 4 versus the Louisiana Ragin Cajuns which I guarantee won’t have helmets as spiffy as Ole Miss. I also am certain their players won’t be as talented. News outlets in Louisiana will be crying out after Wake wins by 14 points that there’s some little school in North Carolina called Wake Forest that has ruined the entire Fall across the state of Louisiana. The Cajuns will be ragin’ mad about the embarrassing loss and fire the team administrator who scheduled a game with Wake Forest.
Off to a 4 and 0 start, Wake will go over to North Carolina State raging mad about getting smoked by them last season, and by this time the California kid will have mastered the delayed RPO mesh offense and it won’t be stoppable. Wake will outscore the Ragin’ Wolfpack, 35-28. Hazen will intercept a pass.
Clemson will rage into Wake the next week and Clawson will remind his team that two years ago when the Tigers came to Winston-Salem it went to overtime and Wake could have easily won, and that since that game the team declined the rest of the season and that had a hangover effect throughout last season with the one bright spot when the Great Santino won a game in the last 12 seconds and Pete and me went out for Mexican food late into the night. Pete ate his four plates in one minute 52 seconds.
Clawson has said he’s going to remember that game on his deathbed as will I and all of you. And he’ll tell the team there’s no way they’re going to make him have two games to remember on his deathbed by losing again to Clemson at home. All this deathbed talk will be so powerful that his players will play as if possessed by supernatural spirits and take out Clemson, 23-20.
Off to a 6 and 0 start, College GameDay will consider hosting its show from Winston-Salem before the UConn game at UConn but that won’t make sense because UConn is now Wake’s home field. Plus Kirk Herbstreit will vote not to get excited about Wake’s start and that he’s confident they will fade away later in the season as they typically do.
Up at UConn Sportface, Pistol and an eclectic yet still TBD spread of Wake people will go there hoping to see the undefeated season stay intact. Sportface will feel ill because of the pressure to win the game and because he’s not a fan of anything related to UConn. But he’ll remember when Wake beat UConn in a bowl game in Charlotte several years ago and a Wake band called The Fez played at a dive bar later that night and the lead singer, Spars, said: “All of us Wake fans would like to welcome all UConn fans here tonight.”
We got UConn. They can’t beat Wake in football. If it’s ever happened, I’m not going to bring it up now because it doesn’t fit the narrative and it would take time to research and none of us care anyway.
Wake will fly across America to play Stanford the next week and there will be the national story that two of the most prestigious academic schools in the country will be playing football: Wake Forest and Stanford. There will be profiles leading up to the game about famous scholars who graduated from these schools including Sammy Sportface.
Not many Stanford fans will attend the game because they view academics as more important than football. Playing for a sparse crowd, Stanford won’t be up for the moment and Wake will be jacked to keep the undefeated dream season ticking and they’ll roll, 28-14. The California Kid playing QB for Wake will tell his coach he’s so glad he chose Wake over Stanford to play football because it’s a winning program and he feels the academic experience at Wake is better than he could ever imagine it being at Stanford.
The Deacs will fly back home to take on the U of California Bears, a school more interested in developing software programmers and artificial intelligence entrepreneurs than first-rate football teams. They haven’t really cared about football there since “The Band is On the Field” play back in the 1980s. They’ll be jetlagged and feel out of sorts in Winston-Salem, which isn’t anything like Berkeley, California, and they’ll just want to get on the plane and get back to the West Coast. Look for a blowout: 28-3.
The next game will be over in Chapel Hill against the North Carolina Tar Heels. Clawson will remind his team that two years ago they went over there undefeated and were ahead by 21 points in the fourth quarter then choked everything away and lost, and he knows that broke Sportface. He’ll tell his players there’s no way he’s going to want to remember on his deathbed losing to Carolina twice late in a season when undefeated and will threaten that if they don’t win they’ll all have to run hills for four hours straight at Monday’s practice.
Not wanting to run that much, and starting to believe this was the season they had all hoped for but didn’t think was possible, they’ll turn all the Carolina fans into dark blue moods and win 31-24. Sportface will run across the field, climb up on the goal post using a ladder, stand there and sing: “I’m a Deacon born, I’m a Deacon bred, and when I die I’m a Deacon dead.”
As the Tar Heel fans file out dejected.
Miami will blow into Winston-Salem the next week looking to inflict a hurricane on the Wake undefeated season. They’ll go ahead by two touchdowns early, but Clawson will pull his team together near the sideline at that stage and tell them if they lose the game he’s going to remember it on his deathbed and he doesn’t want that and plus he’s worried how it will impact Sportface. Taylor Morin will return a punt in the fourth quarter for the go-ahead score and a final score of 42-35.
Afterward I will cruise over to some Mexican restaurant in downtown Winston and order recklessly four or five plates of stuff and call my friend Pete. We’ll start planning a Fez gig for the night before the national championship game.
The final regular season game will be against Duke at Wake. They’ll come in thinking they’re going to ruin our season, but it won’t happen because Donovan Green won’t be guardable that night and Demond Clayborne will run wild and the football players will motivated for payback for the “Flipotripsky” move after the hoops game earlier this year.
The stadium will be swerving like a Burt Reynolds car in “Smokey and the Bandit,” like a ship in rough seas, like this blog. Wake fans won’t let Duke offense hear any of their signals rendering them inept. Blowout again and a rolling of the Quad like after Wake won the ACC Title in 2007.
Herbstreit will poo poo Wake’s undefeated season and predict it will all end ignominiously with a thrashing against Ohio State in the first round of the 12-team national championship playoff. The Deacons will be 28 point underdogs. But the California Kid will flummox Ohio State with the delayed RPO they’ve never seen run in the Big 10. A field goal will win it, 24-21, by Wake’s field goal kicker or maybe the punter if something happens to the kicker.
Wake will play Michigan in the next round and beat them. It won’t be close: Wake 35-17. Sportface will write a blog about Jim Harbaugh having to cheat to get his natty last season.
Then Alabama in the final game. Gamblers will be enticed to bet on the Deacs, who will be 30 point underdogs. Herbstreit will announce there is zero chance Wake will win the game. Will predict an obliteration.
Sportface will write a blog the night before this climax saying Wake will win by 22 points and that’s exactly what will happen. Roll Deacs.
Wake fans far and wide, including every member of the Demon Deacon Sports Nation, will ask DJ how they can get closer to Sammy Sportface, the man who predicted correctly everything that would happen during the Wake Forest football season.
There will be a party after the national championship title where Sportface will address the Wake Forest team and coaches.
“If you didn’t win this national title,” he’ll say, “I was going to remember the bad feelings on my deathbed. Fortunately, you came through for the greatest institution of higher learning this country has ever seen. You disproved your doubters. Now let’s party. Roll Deacs. And be sure to join the Sammy Sportface Baby Boomer Brotherhood.”
The Fez will play Queen’s “We Are the Champions.”
Sportface will slow dance with Pete, Spars, DJ, Rip, Claiborne, the California Kid, Bill Merrifield, Clawson, Hazen, and Rebecca Riggs.
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Sammy Sportface, a sports blogger, galvanizes, inspires, and amuses The Baby Boomer Brotherhood. And you can learn about his vision and join this group's Facebook page here:
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