In his eighth year coaching the Demon Deacons, Clawson doesn’t really get mad.
At this point, Wake was ranked 16th, four spots lower than any other undefeated Power 5 school.
“The formulas out there, they always downgrade us,” Clawson said.
The system loves Alabama, Ohio State and Georgia, because it was built to appreciate their brute force.
They’ve just received a $20 million donation to help build a new football facility, and they have their sights set on crashing the College Football Playoff in spite of a roster filled with guys none of their blue-blood counterparts wanted.
While coaches like Minnesota’s P.J.
So yeah, Clawson is a little bit mad.
CLAWSON TOOK THE Wake Forest job in 2014 after successful stints at Fordham, Richmond and Bowling Green, and he knew from the outset the renovation would be difficult.
But what are the factors that make a job hard, and what is it about a particular coach that makes them well suited for that particular challenge? There are a lot of great things about Wake Forest that nobody else in the country has.
Clawson has a dry, accessible demeanor and an analytical approach to problems. To keep his wife safe from COVID-19 last season, he set up house in his office for weeks at a time.
Clawson’s first two years at Wake were a slog, both ending with a 3-9 record, but he saw progress.
“The key to our success is to find the guys who can still develop and become as good as those four- and five-star guys,” Clawson said.
Since 2015, Wake has as many first- and second-round draft picks as Texas, and in 2021, two players Clawson signed out of high school are among the top 10 betting favorites to win the Heisman trophy.
But as the talent developed, Clawson and Ruggiero adopted a new approach, a sort of Frankenstein’s monster version of the triple option that utilizes a delay at the mesh point between the QB and running back that nearly affords a fan enough time to get off the couch and grab a beer before Hartman decides whether to pull the ball or hand it off.
Another bowl win in 2018. In 2019, Wake won its first five games and finished with eight wins for the second time in three years.
All of that might be enough to have most coaches looking for the first ticket to a more high-profile gig, but that’s never been Clawson’s aim.
Looking back, Clawson admits the experience was miserable, but he said he learned from it.
HARTMAN DIDN’T EXPECT his prediction in July to gain much attention.
Under Clawson, Wake had made real progress, but 10 wins? At Wake Forest? The program has been around since 1908, and in its entire history had exactly one 10-win season.
Off the field, the Deacons made headlines.
In scrimmages, the offense and defense traded blows, neither side falling too far behind the other.
Now 2021 was here, and Wake Forest was ready to unveil the machine it had built under the COVID-19-imposed veil.
At Fordham, Clawson inherited Jason George as the team’s strength coach when he took the job in 1999, and while George eventually found a career in the NFL, the two remained close.
Wake Forest had started hot nearly every year, but injuries and a lack of depth always managed to torpedo promising seasons.
At first, George came in as a consultant on a three-day deal, returning with a detailed plan on ways to improve training loads, practice efficiency and data analysis.
The team had been using Catapult wearable performance trackers, and George developed better ways to interpret the data and design specific programs for individual players.
“When we’re physically working our athletes, there’s a purpose behind doing it,” George said.
Clawson calls George “an interpreter,” who easily communicates between players, coaches and the strength staff.
Again, he turned to his business books for the terminology: “Level 5 Leadership.” The idea, Clawson said, is that greatness comes from the seemingly paradoxical accumulation of ambition and humility.
“There have been times in the past where I think we celebrated getting to six wins or being undefeated in September.
Now, eight games into the 2021 season, the Deacons are undefeated, the ACC Atlantic is theirs for the taking.
CLAWSON HAD JUST finished a late breakfast at the dining hall across from Wake’s football facilities this summer, when a student stopped him on his way out the door.
It’s a place where he can personally sell the program to every new freshman who steps onto campus — “His favorite things are coaching football and talking about Wake Forest,” Currie said — but changing a narrative requires a megaphone, and since arriving seven years ago, he’s always heard the same refrain: Wake was a great place to go to school, but …
They are undefeated, and Clawson has finally forced the world to reckon with a program that refuses to fit into any of the mass-produced boxes the system expects.
In the other, Wake Forest loses — this week or another, it doesn’t matter when.
Clawson proved he can rejuvenate a small-time program, so what if he traded up for a bigger office and more opulent facilities and a traditional offensive scheme led by a five-star QB? What if he did all that and still kept winning? There will almost certainly be suitors in the coming months willing to bet he could.
The job isn’t done, but it’s clear to Currie that Clawson has passed the point of filling in the foundation and turned the program into one that expects to win every year.