Dave Clawson has taken Wake Forest from good to great by spending less, achieving more
Not long after he became the head football coach at Wake Forest in 2014, Dave Clawson met for lunch with his predecessor. Jim Grobe, Clawson told reporters earlier this week, “was part of the reason that to me this job was so attractive when it opened,” and that was because Grobe, Clawson went on, “gave everybody hope here that Wake Forest could win.”
When the two men met almost eight years ago, Grobe was “really gracious,” Clawson said.
At the time, Clawson was entering his first major-conference head coaching job, after five years at Bowling Green, and Grobe had become the most successful coach in modern Wake history. During his tenure, the Demon Deacons transformed from perennial afterthoughts to respectable pests, and sometimes much more. They went to five bowl games and in 2006 broke through with 11 victories and an ACC championship on their way to the Orange Bowl.
After that peak, Grobe’s program slowly declined, though, and eventually plateaued. Wake Forest replaced him with Clawson, and when he met with Grobe “he kind of shared with me how he built it,” Clawson said, “and then what he would’ve done differently once they won.”
Now Wake is in the midst of its most successful season since that uncharacteristic ascension in 2006. Entering Saturday, the Demon Deacons are 8-0 for the first time in school history, and are ranked in the top 10 of The Associated Press poll for the first time, too. They’re in the midst of the kind of season their opponent Saturday, North Carolina, expected to have.
The Tar Heels rode a wave of offseason hype to a top-10 preseason ranking. They had what seemed to be a bonafide Heisman Trophy candidate in quarterback Sam Howell. They had many others back from an Orange Bowl appearance and Mack Brown, their charismatic head coach, cautioned against some of the expectations but still embraced them.
A little more than an hour’s drive west, meanwhile, Wake Forest quietly went to work, familiar if not content with its place in the shadow of schools that always receive more attention. In many ways, Wake is the anti-hype, the opposite of a program like UNC this year or any other team that is annually exalted in the preseason, only to fall flat when the games start.
By now, being overlooked is baked into the Demon Deacons’ DNA. In a college football world built on excess — schools racing each other to build the most lavish facilities, or pay their coaching staffs the most money — Wake has long been defined by its inherent limitations. It’s the smallest university (by enrollment) of any in a so-called Power Five conference. Among those schools, the Demon Deacons play in the smallest stadium. They’ve grown used to doing more with less, which is part of the message that Grobe imparted on Clawson at the start of his tenure.
“You’ve got to keep feeding this thing, right?” Clawson said earlier this week. “In college football, you can make advancements, but the bar keeps moving, and whether it’s facilities or staff size or nutrition, or whatever it is — the bar to be great always gets moved.
“And if you’re not willing to follow that bar, you’re going to fall behind. And I thought we were capable of winning here, and my concern was once we won, was it sustainable? And I didn’t think it would be sustainable unless there was a facility commitment.”
Clawson was referring to the yet-to-be constructed football-only facility Wake Forest is planning. Last Friday, the day before the Demon Deacons’ 45-7 victory against Duke, Wake announced a $20 million donation from Bob McCreary, a 1961 graduate who played football at Wake Forest before building a successful furniture business.
The gift from McCreary, whom the university in a release described as “the largest donor in Wake Forest Athletics history,” will cover a significant chunk of the $38 million price tag for the McCreary Football Complex. According to a video on the school’s website, the building will include a barbershop (“Dapper Deacon”) and a modern locker room called “DEACTOWN.”
The hope at Wake is that the facility eventually helps to level the playing field. Yet for now, Wake has become a rare kind of outlier in a sport long dominated by the haves, and have-mores: The school with one of the ACC’s smallest football budgets has arrived in November with the conference’s greatest hope — its only hope, really — of reaching the College Football Playoff.
Deacons at an economic disadvantage
After his team won its first four games, achieving the same 4-0 record it had reached in several other seasons during his tenure, Clawson became troubled. A couple players, he said, missed classes. Others were late to a study hall.
Relatively minor infractions but ones, still, that reminded him of past trouble.
“I was worried we were losing it,” Clawson said, thinking back to 2019, when his team started 7-1 only to lose four of its final five games. “And we just (said), ‘Guys, this is what happened in ‘19. We’re not putting up with it.’ And our leadership — we self-corrected.”
Clawson acknowledged the “human nature” aspect of success; that “when you accomplish something, you want to relax.” Yet “football season doesn’t allow you to do that,” he said, and besides, the margin between success and failure is already thinner at Wake than at a lot of places.
Wake Forest, the university, isn’t necessarily hurting. It boasts a lofty academic reputation, a pristine but small campus and considers among its peers UNC and Duke, both of which, like Wake, compete to attract the brightest minds to its highly ranked law and medical schools. But Wake Forest, the football program, fights a different kind of battle.
According to data schools are required to submit annually to the Department of Education, Wake’s football spending is among the lowest in the ACC. The data doesn’t always offer an apple-to-apples comparison, given different accounting methods schools use to compile it, but according to those numbers Wake spent $24.7 million on football in 2019, the most recent year available.
That was second to last in the ACC — only ahead of N.C. State, according to the Department of Education spending database. (An N.C. State spokesperson said the university actually spent $25.1 million on football in 2019, which would have placed it just ahead of Wake in the conference.)
Regardless of accounting methodology, Wake faces a significant spending deficit relative to its wealthiest peers in the conference, and nationally. In the ACC, half of the league’s 14 full-time members more than doubled its football spending over the past decade. Florida State’s football spending more than quadrupled ($16.3 million in 2009 to $67.8 million in 2019), while Clemson’s more than tripled ($16.3 million to $55.9 million).
Wake’s football spending almost doubled during the same span, going from $12.5 million to $24.7 million — and yet the school still lost financial ground. The spending data includes money schools put toward coaching salaries and operating expenses and recruiting budgets and, to Clawson, it all reinforced the blueprint that Grobe established more than a decade ago:
That while recruiting is important, as it is anywhere, player development is even more critical. That holding out incoming freshmen and allowing them to grow, both physically and mentally, can be a kind of secret weapon, especially when employed with players who flew under the recruiting radar and thus already entered college with an advanced desire of something to prove.
“People say, oh, you know — you redshirt,” Clawson said. “Well that’s what you have to do here. I don’t remember the last time that we stole a recruit from Clemson or Florida State. If we did, the recruit lied about their offer.”
On the radar for the College Football Playoff
One way that Wake Forest football is the same as a lot of its peers, even ones far more wealthy, is that it employs one of those motivational slogans made for a T-shirt or a social media hashtag. They’re usually as nebulous as they are endless, these phrases that flood Twitter on fall Saturdays like a plague of old Successories posters.
There’s UNC’s #BeTheOne and N.C. State’s #1Pack1Goal and, at Duke, #DukeGang, whatever that might convey. At Wake, Clawson gave some thought to its motto, and “From Good to Great” isn’t as much a hashtag or branding effort as it is a real mantra that players have taken to heart. It’s also one that Clawson wouldn’t have used even a season ago.
Due to inexperience and personnel losses, “I never would have come up with that slogan in 2020,” Clawson said.
But entering this season, “I thought this team, if they applied themselves, would have a chance to have a special year.” The optimism was due to depth, and experience. Sam Hartman, the fourth-year sophomore quarterback, leads an offense that’s become one of the nation’s most successful. All but two of the Demon Deacons’ starters have been in the program for at least three seasons; six of them are in their fourth season of college football.
On defense, where Wake has been more inconsistent, nine of the 11 starters are in at least their third season of college football. Overall, five of Wake’s starters are so-called super seniors — players who returned for the extra year of eligibility the NCAA afforded because of the pandemic — and another two super seniors are in the rotation as backups.
The experience, and the way players have developed over several years, has allowed Wake to overcome its modest recruiting, which, on paper, suggests the Demon Deacons should at times be overmatched by more talented teams. The results on the field, meanwhile, have suggested something else entirely, and two months into the season the Demon Deacons have become one of this season’s Cinderella stories, the national attention increasing by the week.
“We keep reminding each other, put on the blinders,” Brandon Chapman, a tight end who’s in his sixth season of college football, told reporters earlier this week. Chapman, like several of his teammates, has been around long enough to have experienced the disappointment of the not-so distant past.
But, “This year we’ve been emphasizing not taking anything for granted,” said Ke’Shawn Williams, a freshman receiver who has heard stories from his older teammates. “ ... We’re not entitled to win any games just because we’ve got a 10 next to our name.”
He was referencing Wake’s ranking in The AP Top 25, but the Demon Deacons debuted at one spot higher, No. 9, in the season’s first College Football Playoff rankings. The eight teams ahead of Wake Forest in those rankings — Georgia, Alabama, Michigan State, Oregon, Ohio State, Cincinnati, Michigan and Oklahoma — spent an average of $42.3 million on football in 2019, and among those schools Wake outspent only Cincinnati.
There’s a similar disparity in recent recruiting class rankings among those schools and Wake, yet the Demon Deacons are there, nonetheless, in the company of several schools (Alabama, Ohio State, Georgia, Oklahoma) that always seem to figure prominently in the playoff picture. The question now is whether the Demon Deacons can continue turning their motto into reality as they begin the most challenging part of their schedule.
There’s the trip Saturday to Chapel Hill, where a non-conference game against a longtime conference rival awaits. UNC has been perhaps the nation’s most disappointing team, relative to expectations, but the Tar Heels have still shown flashes. After that, Wake hosts N.C. State and travels to Clemson in consecutive weeks. By then it should be clear if the Demon Deacons have really made the ascension to great or if they stalled at merely ... good, which might be a disappointment for them given their talk earlier this week.
Clawson intimated that the season might only be halfway over, which would portend a trip to the College Football Playoff. Nick Andersen, a second-year freshman defensive back, put it more plainly, referencing the date of the national championship game.
“It’s not a surprise at all,” he said of the best start in school history. “This was our goal, and our goal is even higher than this. Our goal is to be playing on January 10th.”
This story was originally published November 5, 2021 at 6:30 AM.
