LEARNING ON JOB: 13 STARTERS EITHER FRESHMEN OR SOPHOMORES
Football is a numbers game: 85 on scholarship, 11 on a side, a stretcher on every sideline.
Wake Forest football, 2010 style, is a game that makes numbers crunchers and Coach Jim Grobe wince: 68-24 at Stanford, 52-21 at Virginia Tech, 62-14 at Maryland.
The Deacons (2-6) lost them all, extending the sinking spell to six straight as Boston College stomps into town. The 2006 ACC championship and the school’s only major bowl seem far away. The blues highways of the 1970s and 1990s seem just around the corner.
“I think the best thing about being at Wake Forest is that when you do win and you’re successful, you feel really good because you know you’re overachieving,” Grobe said. “I’ve got to tell you, though, I’m not happy losing. I don’t like losing at all. I don’t like being in the position we’re in right now.”
The position is nearly last in the ACC standings and NCAA statistics. The Deacons rank 117th out of 120 top-division teams in scoring defense (41 points a game) and total defense (453 yards). Since last October, Wake Forest has beaten Duke twice and Presbyterian once, a 3-11 inverse of the Orange Bowl season.
Grobe recites the factors: too many youngsters and too few seniors, too many mistakes and too little improvement, too many dangerous comeback passes and too little consistency, especially on the road. “We’re putting out so many fires on both sides of the ball that it’s hard to get your head above water,” Grobe said.
Some of those heads have suffered concussions, including freshman quarterback Tanner Price and flanker-kick returner Devon Brown. Some younger heads have experienced instructional whiplash, an occupational hazard on a depth chart with nine freshmen and sophomores among the starting 22 but only four seniors.
Grobe’s original business plan involved winning early with Jim Caldwell’s veterans and redshirting freshmen to build deeper rosters. It worked brilliantly, the big breakthrough following records of 5-7, 4-7 and 4-7.
“This,” Grobe said, “is the senior class we recruited off that 4-7 year when nobody knew: ‘Can they really get it going? It’s the same old Wake.’ As honestly as I can tell you, there are some teams in the country that just reload every year. We’re not one of them.
“If we have a few kids that don’t quite achieve the way we need them to, maybe don’t do as well academically or they get homesick.... We had one kid get homesick and leave. One kid has a girlfriend and leaves. You have this and that, and then some kids just don’t develop like you hope they will and you’ve got problems here because were not going to have 85 five-star recruits here and just pick and choose who plays every year.”
Whatever the structural recruiting issues, Wake Forest’s win totals have declined steadily: 11, 9, 8, 5 (with 5 close losses) and, right now, 2 with BC, N.C. State, Clemson and Vandy left. The defensive drop — 32 points allowed per ACC game last year, 43 this year — flows from the departure of overall No. 4 pick Aaron Curry, Alphonso Smith and two other 2009 draftees, talent the program may never match.
The combination of a flimsy senior class and youngsters with superior raw skills creates an odd mix trying to learn on the run. Grobe’s blunt diagnosis: His personnel model is upside down. “Our football lab is on Saturday afternoon, and that’s not a good thing,” he said.
What’s worse, Grobe senses that aging only increases his impatience when the situation calls for teaching. “The screaming and yelling and going crazy’s not going to help,” he said. “We never start with criticizing the players. We’ve got to look at the coaching first. A big part of this is us. Our biggest problem is that we made some mistakes in recruiting and we’re paying for that a little bit right now, but recruiting at Wake Forest is not a science.”
When science leaves a void, the math sometimes gets ugly.
lrawlings@wsjournal.com
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