NC State loss shows Wake Forest that this perceived strength is really a big weakness

What was supposed to be the strength of Wake Forest’s football team has been torched by Clemson and bludgeoned by N.C. State to start the season.

The Demon Deacons have a problem on defense.

“I’m very concerned,” coach Dave Clawson said of his defense’s struggles. “Going into it, I really thought that would be the strength of our football team. We’re a little young and short at corner, but that’s not — that didn’t hurt us tonight at all.”

Wake Forest (0-2, 0-2 ACC) was gashed by N.C. State’s rushing attack to the tune of 270 yards, a major factor in the Demon Deacons’ 45-42 loss on Saturday night.

Clawson anticipated — as would anybody, given 10 returning starters — his defense would be able to shoulder the burden for an offense with new starters at every skill position and a revamped offensive line.

Instead, after Wake Forest’s first 0-2 start since 2007, it’s his top concern.

“You have all of those guys coming back on the D-line and all of those linebackers coming back and … this is a team a year ago that didn’t run the ball against us at all,” Clawson said. “… That right now is problem No. 1 that we’ve gotta get fixed.”

A year ago, in Wake Forest’s 44-10 win against N.C. State, the Wolfpack had 116 yards on the ground. Across the Demon Deacons’ last four games — all losses, the longest such streak since 2015 — they’ve given up 203 rushing yards per game and 490 total yards per game.

“It’s just a bunch of communication errors,” senior defensive end Boogie Basham said. “We’ve definitely done it in practice and preseason, so it’s just bringing it from practice to the game. I would say that’s what our biggest problem is right now.”

The Demon Deacons entered the season boasting a defensive line that returned every main contributor from last season and added a couple of pieces. They would set the tone in front of a linebacker corps that, while it lost Justin Strnad, it returned every other key piece — and Strnad was lost halfway through the season, giving Wake Forest plenty of time to adjust to life without him.

Given those aspects, perhaps the most frustrating aspect of the Wolfpack’s ground success was that the Demon Deacons adjusted early and things still went awry.

“We weren’t doing a lot of double-covering, we were putting the linebacker in the box, the safety in the box,” Clawson said. “They just ran that stretch play and they got seams and we missed some tackles, we did not create a new line of scrimmage at all.

“That’s been their bread-and-butter play for years here and they got into some formations and we never dented it. At times we got reached up front, and then we didn’t clean it up at the second level.”

A week before, Trevor Lawrence shredded Wake Forest for 351 yards in less than three quarters – and given who he is, it’s as if that’s easier to stomach than the Wolfpack’s sucess.

“We’ve just gotta put it all together,” senior cornerback Ja’Sir Taylor said. “One week it’s the secondary, one week it’s the run support. We know we can do it, we have flashes where everybody is clicking on all cylinders.”

Notre Dame is two games into its life as an ACC member and is next up on what Clawson referred to as a “murderer’s row” of an opening three-game slate. The Irish had 281 rushing yards in Saturday’s 52-0 evisceration of South Florida.

“We definitely have to move with a sense of urgency if we want to achieve our goal,” Taylor said. “Having two losses already in the ACC is tough, so we’ve gotta get off the mat and have a big performance next week against Notre Dame.”

This story was originally published September 20, 2020 at 7:49 AM.