It can be hard to immediately define what a single win, or a single loss, means to a football team in a given year. And yet, in the immediate gratification era, we all try to define it anyway. So, what did Saturday’s win mean for Wake Forest?
There are obvious points. It stopped a horrendous three-game conference losing streak. It put the team back above .500 in the overall record. And it put some upbeat emotions back into the locker room for the first time in a month.
At 4-3, Wake Forest is within two games of the bowl-eligible benchmark of six wins. That is not even close to an automatic with the five games remaining. The Demon Deacons still have to face Florida State, Duke, and Notre Dame in that back half of the schedule. Florida State is playing for a spot in the College Football Playoffs. Duke gets two weeks to try to get Riley Leonard back. And Notre Dame…well, we really don’t have to tell you, do we?
That makes the game at home against North Carolina State, and the season finale at Syracuse on Thanksgiving weekend must-win games. And as we know with this Wake team, nothing is a given; see GA Tech and VA Tech games that were “booked” as wins before the season started.
But for the here and now, for that brief period of time when they could bask in the win before it was time to move on to what’s next, there was a unified sense of happiness. Much has been written about the late-game heroics of a third-string quarterback. The tale of Santino Marucci will live on for some time. But the list of upsides goes well beyond that.
Wake got some explosive runs, something that has been on head coach Dave Clawson’s wish list all season. They got good blocking up front, and better blocking from the running backs than what they have seen in recent weeks. And maybe most importantly, for the first time in a month, the defense was rewarded for its work and not left with the, “We did what we could” sense. For weeks, the defense has performed mostly well, only for the Demon Deacons offense to come up empty at the end of the game.
The Wake defense did give up 414 yards of offense, and you are going to lose quite a few games when you do that. But 152 of that was in the fourth quarter when the game became like a race car that was driving a little loose all over the track. And while giving up 152 yards of offense in the final quarter can feel tenuous, it was the defense that kept the Demon Deacons in the game throughout the first three quarters to even give Marucci a shot at the late-game heroics. Defensive back Chelen Garnes described the locker room emotion after the game as, “Amazing.” He said the win came because “Everybody did their job.”
In the celebratory fervor after this type of win some of the details get lost. The Demon Deacons produced a sustained running attack, which is no small thing when operating the offense with a third-string quarterback. Demond Claiborne and Justice Ellison combined for 156 yards. Claiborne had touchdown runs of 18 and 42 yards, giving Clawson the explosive play from a running back he had been waiting for. Claiborne said things seemed a little tight at the beginning. “I came to the sideline and my coach [running backs coach John Hunter], told me basically to trust in it,” he said after the game. “I trusted my coach and the ability that the run game could work.” Trust becomes a lot easier when things work and the team wins.
The offense was far from perfect. It was downright stuck for the first half, managing all of 92 total yards. Even when taking the big picture overview after the game, Marucci finished the game 12 of 21 for 151 yards, one touchdown, and two interceptions. But it is going to be the touchdown that everyone remembers.
At the end of the day, a win is a win. Particularly when the bottom was falling out from the season. It was only a week ago that Clawson acknowledged he did not foresee the issues that came about during the three-game losing streak. Saturday the analysis was a lot easier to come by.
“If you’re winning, your confidence grows. Your commitment grows. Your competency grows,” he said Saturday night. “If you’re losing those things tend to fall off. So good teams have a tendency to get better and losing teams have a tendency to get worse.” So does that get us to an answer on what this win means? “If you lose three you need that spike of a reward to keep them going. We’re not where we want to be. I don’t think we’re playing as well as we can. But right now I really don’t care. We found a way to win a football game.”
Sometimes the game is that simple.
