It’s a challenging thing to try to define a season when you are only two games in. But in his 11th season at Wake Forest and 25th season overall as a head coach, Dave Clawson has seen enough to have a sense of what’s what. That’s why it felt worth a pause this week when he said his football program was going through a reset.
Let’s start with what should be the obvious, that going through a reset is not necessarily a negative. Coming off a 4-8 record in 2023, a reset was certainly in order. But can we say that there is a difference between a team reset and a program reset? A team reset is the rebounding from one year to the next. A program reset certainly feels more big picture.
Context matters, of course. Clawson made the comment at his weekly press conference Tuesday. He was putting the final remarks on the one-point loss to Virginia. The Demon Deacons were in a position to win the game late. Down 31-30 in the closing two minutes of the game, quarterback Hank Bachmeier completed a pass to Taylor Morin down to the Virginia 35-yard line. Morin got hit hard and fumbled. The ball was on the ground and there for Donavon Greene to fall on it. But the veteran receiver tried to pick it up and make more yardage. He dropped the ball. Virginia recovered. Wake had to burn all three of its timeouts on defense, and the Cavaliers salted the game away.
So it was within that storyline that Clawson made his comments. He recapped how the offense found a rhythm throughout the game. The running game was there. And on defense, they did mostly well on third downs, a big priority for the coaching staff this season.
“We just didn’t, we didn’t close the deal,” he said. “I thought it was a game on both sides where the talent level was fairly equal. And when the talent level is fairly equal, a lot of times it will come down to one play either way. Give credit to Virginia. They made those plays at critical times and we didn’t,” he added. “I think in a lot of ways our program is kind of going through a reset, almost like we were eight years ago.”
Eight years ago would have been the 2016 season. The team was coming off a 3-9 season in 2015, with only one conference win. In 2016, Wake Forest went 7-6 on the season, including a win over Temple in the Military Bowl. Of course, it was also the year of the WakeyLeaks scandal. But Clawson’s comparative was really about the play on the field.
The Demon Deacons were 3-1 in out-of-conference play with wins over Tulane, Delaware, and Indiana, and a loss to Army. But they finished the season 3-5 in conference play. Wake won five of their first six games including conference wins over Duke and Syracuse. From there they would only win two more games, a home game against Virginia, and the bowl game. That 2016 season also started the string of seven consecutive bowl appearances, a streak that was snapped last year.
Clawson said it is about, “Learning how to win.” He reemphasized that the difference in the type of games they had last Saturday is a very small margin of a play here or there. “It was good to see us play well against an ACC program,” he said. “In a lot of ways, it was probably as complete of a football game as we’ve played against ACC competition in a long time. That’s why not finding a way to win it is disappointing.”
Clawson said Tuesday that he felt like last season was similar to 2015. “So now, we’re back in these games and we’ve got to find ways to win them.” He pointed out that in that period of three years after the 2015 season, the team found ways to manage close games. “Then guys start believing they can find ways to win games.”
He said that creates the upward trend of winning teams gathering more talent, and eventually, you come up with a 2021 season where they were 7-1 in conference and 11-3 overall. Most of the wins were blowouts.
The pain in the post-game press conference Saturday night was visible. Bachmeier is in his sixth year with almost all of that time as a starter, (Boise State, Louisiana Tech, and now Wake). He has seen and done a lot from different vantage points. He said the sign of a team that can get over the emotion of the loss is to, “Be in the present moment. You can’t sit in the past. You’re always going to have another two-minute drill. You’re always going to have another situation where you’re down a point. You’ve just got to play the next play.”
The learning-how-to-win curve is steep this week. The #5 team in the country comes into town in the Ole Miss Rebels. It wasn’t that long ago that they themselves needed a reset of their own. They were 5-5 in Lane Kiffin’s first year as head coach in the 2020 Covid year. And that was after back-to-back losing seasons. They have been 31-10 since then.
Maybe the scoreboard doesn’t tell where Wake is in the reset phase after Saturday’s game. Maybe it does. But more likely it will be how Clawson and the players get a sense of how they competed against a program that has the financial and recruiting resources that far outweigh what Wake has.
After that, it is a week off, and another viable opportunity for the reset button with a home game against Louisiana Lafayette.
