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It’s mid-October, Wake Forest is 6-0 entering its open date, and Dave Clawson is mad.
Well, he’s not mad, exactly. In his seventh year coaching the Demon Deacons, Clawson doesn’t really get mad. This is part of his coaching ethos. There are no F-bombs, media tirades or wild swings of emotion. Clawson wants to be the same guy every day. So no, he’s not mad. Perturbed, perhaps.
At this point, Wake was ranked 16th, four spots lower than any other undefeated Power 5 school. The Demon Deacons led the ACC’s Atlantic Division, but few pundits thought they’d stay there for long. Then there were the advanced metrics. The algorithms were downright dismissive of Wake Forest. The way Clawson sees it, the whole system is too narrow-minded.
“The formulas out there, they always downgrade us,” Clawson said. “I don’t think it’s fair to our players that what we do is discounted, because of some recruiting rankings that came out six years ago that locks them in a certain way. Once you’re a three-star, you’re always a three-star.”
Even now, the Deacons are a 2.5-point underdog for Saturday’s game against 4-4 North Carolina (noon ET on ABC and the ESPN App), and ESPN’s Football Power Index gives them only about a 50-50 shot of winning the division they currently lead.
But it’s not as if the algorithms screwed up the math, Clawson said. It’s that they measure the wrong things. The system loves Alabama, Ohio State and Georgia, because it was built to appreciate their brute force.
Wake Forest, with its three-star recruits-turned-sixth-year seniors, its unconventional offense and outside-the-box coach — “the most progressive coach in America,” according to Jason George, the team’s director of performance — somehow works.
Wake Forest is “Moneyball.”
“We can’t take lesser talent and win the race,” Clawson said. “So we had to change the race.”
Wake Forest is 8-0 for the first time in its history. It’s ninth in the Playoff committee’s initial rankings, the highest ranked team in the ACC. The…
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Source : espn
