Everything is changing in college football.
Teams are once again on the move as conferences realign, and the transfer portal is shuffling rosters to the point where a team’s portal ranking may be more important than the quality of its recruiting class.
There is one island of stability in the storm of change in football — Wake Forest.
Dave Clawson is a throwback, building his program the old-fashioned way. He gets promising players and develops them. It’s slow, steady and supposedly obsolete in the wild west that is post-COVID NCAA football.
“Sam Hartman went to Notre Dame,” Clawson pointed out. Hartman has quarterbacked the Deacs for 48 games since 2018. “Rondell Bothroyd (42 games on the defensive line since 2018) went to Oklahoma. Those guys spent five years in our program. They did everything right. What’s not talked about is all the players who stayed.”
Clawson pointed out proudly that only one other team lost fewer players in the transfer portal this past offseason. And that was despite outside influence, as he made headlines by pointing out at ACC Football Kickoff in Charlotte last month.
“You don’t think these guys all had offers to go to other schools?” Clawson asked. “We had six to eight players that were tampered with, that were given great NIL opportunities, and they all chose to stay.”
Clawson later doubled down on his tampering accusations, saying his players were offered from $150,000 to $500,000 to leave.
“I love the way they handled it,” he said of his players. “They didn’t try to leverage, negotiate. They just wanted me to know as the head coach that these things are now going on in college football, which I knew. But when you get the firsthand examples of it, of ‘This school offered me this much to go there at this time,’ those are very real things.”
Clawson wouldn’t say which schools were reaching out to players on his roster, although he seemed to know. “One school did it with three different players,” he said. “It was great: ‘No, no, no.’ And the money offers kept getting better.”
Wake’s players seem to be immune to the temptations that are roiling the football landscape, where everyone — from conference commissioners to university presidents to backup linebackers — is looking for the best possible payday.
“I look at it as a positive,” Clawson said. “We had the second-fewest players in the country going into the portal. So like most football teams in the country, yeah, we lost some guys in the portal. I’m more happy about all the guys that stayed. That doesn’t make as good of a headline for a story, but our program has been based on, again, recruiting the right guys, retaining them and graduating them.”
That’s not to say that Wake is on the verge of leaving the ACC for the Ivy League. They’re still playing big-time football at the highest level.
“We are still attempting to run a college football program at Wake Forest,” he said. “We have a (NIL) collective, and I’m sure all these guys are getting something. It’s not like we’re ignoring the new age of college football, but our program is still based on retention and graduation. If you look at the amount of players who went into the portal, I would argue that we’re managing this as well as anybody in the country right now.”
Clawson’s coaching staff is also the picture of stability. He is the third longest-tenured coach in the ACC, behind Dabo Swinney and Dave Doeren, despite being mentioned as a possible candidate to move to a football power with a vacancy seemingly every offseason. He’s in his 10th season at Wake Forest, and four of his assistants, as well as Wake’s strength coach, have also been with him at least that long.
“In this day and age in college football to be able to live in the same house with your family and your kids, to be able to go to schools and be in the same place, I’m fortunate that Wake Forest has allowed me to do that,” he said, “but I think I’m very philosophically aligned with the place.
“The reason I got into coaching college football are all the things we do at Wake Forest,” he continued. “We recruit high-character young men that care about their schoolwork. They graduate. They have very exciting trajectories after Wake Forest, whether it be in the NFL or other professions. I don’t have to fight my conscience going to work every day.”
It’s all part of the stable ground on which the Deacs’ program is built.
“I mean, we don’t get four- and five-star recruits,” Clawson said. “Somehow, we manage to win games because I think our coaches, our strength staff, our nutritionists, our trainers, we do a great job developing players. … When you are in your program three, four, five, six years and those things never change, you can get really, really good at them. I think that’s why we’ve had success is that we’ve had a great staff, and I’m fortunate that they’ve chosen to stay too.”
The more things change everywhere else, the more they remain the same in Winston-Salem.
