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Now ends two years of disappointing Wake Forest football from a wins and losses perspective. Four and eight last season; four and eight or five and seven this year.
Lots of losing. Collectively, eight wins and 15 or 16 losses. A real stinger when you factor in the 11-3 season just a few seasons ago.
The final game is tomorrow against Duke. Whatever happens, all that matters to me is the players don’t quit, and that they play with heart and guts because really that’s what matters most. Losing is frustrating; quitting is embarrassing.
I was struck this week by Coach Dave Clawson’s press conference. He struck a positive tone about the future of the program because, with revenue sharing, Wake Forest will be in a better position financially to pay for better players than it has been in the past two years.
I was surprised he feels brighter days are ahead given how gloomily he has been talking about his program’s financial predicament the past two years. I was even more surprised he was talking about next season and the program’s trajectory after tomorrow’s last game.
I have been assuming, based on his public words of frustration about his team’s inability to pay the best players, that he would resign at the end of the season because he just can’t compete with the more financially endowed football programs. I had assumed he would take some other job maybe in college athletic administration working to solve the NIL madness.
But by the way, he was talking about the future, it seems he’s envisioning himself as the coach of that era of Wake Forest football resurgence. The question is whether the athletic director, John Currie, believes Clawson is the right man for the next phase of the program. And I wonder if the president of the university, Susan Wente, thinks it’s time for a change.
I wonder if in her meetings with Clawson, he tells her how much more money he will need to pay players to field a better football team, and I wonder how sympathetic she is to hearing this. She’s running an academic institution – not a football company. If I were her, I would probably be thinking to myself that all this pressure to pay football players more money to win wouldn’t sit really well with my main goals which are centered on educating 18-to-22-year-olds.
The football program brings in money to Wake Forest and that’s important. But my instinct is that she doesn’t think that’s as important as educating young adults to contribute to society for the next several decades.
If this is all about spending more money to get better players in order to win more football games, I think Wake Forest needs to take a step back and ask if any of this makes sense in the long run. If I were president, I would feel compromised and like a sell-out chasing money and becoming distracted from the reason Wake Forest exists in the first place: to educate.
This is all very complicated, I know. But I think it’s time to stop playing by the rules everybody else is just because it helps win more football games. I like to see Wake Forest win football games, but not at the expense of what’s most important: being an institution of higher learning.
I don’t know that Dave Clawson, as much as I like and respect him, can tolerate losing like he has the past two years. He wants to win and it seems is willing to ask for the money so he can keep winning.
If we hire another guy and all he wants is more money so he can win, I don’t think we want him either.
We need to get back to Wake Forest ideals that matter more than paying 18-year-olds millions of dollars which they don’t need and none of us need to be giving them. It’s time to get off this out-of-control freight train.
Whether that means just playing football with the money available now, leaving the ACC, or closing down the program, I think it’s time to become sane and stop succumbing to a game everyone else is playing that isn’t impressive or worth our time.
I’m not sure Clawson is the right guy for the next stage of Wake Forest football. My instincts tell me he is not.
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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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