• Welcome to OGBoards 10.0, keep in mind that we will be making LOTS of changes to smooth out the experience here and make it as close as possible functionally to the old software, but feel free to drop suggestions or requests in the Tech Support subforum!

Steve Forbes credibility watch

The fact is the high point for Forbes was not making the tournament with a team that featured 2 NBA players. I’m optimistic on his future and he surely has shown an uncanny ability to put together a quality team on the fly. Dave Clawson has built a consistent winner at a school that has or recently had the worst winning percentage in history. And his being here was one of the key factors in making these facilities upgrades possible. There is no comparison.
 
Number one, having a lack of socioeconomic and racial diversity makes it much harder to recruit a diverse team. It’s a fact that most good football teams have a lot more diversity than the Waje student body. This is more of a challenge than other schools. No one wants to be the only non-White student in a class.

Also, this ND comparison is flat out dumb. ND doesn’t have a tenth of the challenges that Wake does. Even if we put aside history, it has more resources and twice the undergrad enrollment. Not remotely comparable.
 
awakegirl said:
Number one, having a lack of socioeconomic and racial diversity makes it much harder to recruit a diverse team. It’s a fact that most good football teams have a lot more diversity than the Waje student body. This is more of a challenge than other schools. No one wants to be the only non-White student in a class.

Also, this ND comparison is flat out dumb. ND doesn’t have a tenth of the challenges that Wake does. Even if we put aside history, it has more resources and twice the undergrad enrollment. Not remotely comparable.
Click to expand...
You’re equating teams being diverse to schools being diverse. Notre Dame might be the second least diverse school out there after BYU, and they have a much better program than us. Duke isn’t diverse, most of the SEC schools aren’t diverse, etc. etc.
 
WRS said:
The fact is the high point for Forbes was not making the tournament with a team that featured 2 NBA players. I’m optimistic on his future and he surely has shown an uncanny ability to put together a quality team on the fly. Dave Clawson has built a consistent winner at a school that has or recently had the worst winning percentage in history. And his being here was one of the key factors in making these facilities upgrades possible. There is no comparison.
Click to expand...
Consistent winner? 1 winning conference record in 9 years. I like clawson a lot, but consistent winner is not a term I’d use. Program builder and leader are the two terms I’d go with.
 
We are
NJDeac’22 said:
Consistent winner? 1 winning conference record in 9 years. I like clawson a lot, but consistent winner is not a term I’d use. Program builder and leader are the two terms I’d go with.
Click to expand...
My favorite was whatever thread posters were trying to argue we’ve been the second best acc football program behind Clemson. Lol. I like clawson and hope he wants to stick around but for various reasons there are just some recruiting challenges even clawson hasn’t been able to overcome.

Forbes is good. I’m optimistic about his potential at wake.
 
NJDeac’22 said:
You’re equating teams being diverse to schools being diverse. Notre Dame might be the second least diverse school out there after BYU, and they have a much better program than us. Duke isn’t diverse, most of the SEC schools aren’t diverse, etc. etc.
Click to expand...
You can’t be this dense. Students, like most people, like to live and be in spaces where they feel comfortable and accepted. Wake is exceptionally white and rich. That often doesn’t lead to student athletes feeling comfortable. I’d venture to say that while Duke is more diverse than Wake, their recruiting suffers from some of the same issues.

For comparison purposes, despite you asserting so, there are zero SEC schools less diverse than Wake. Add that to Wake being small and there just aren’t significant numbers of different racial and ethnic groups. That’s a negative.
 
awakegirl said:
You can’t be this dense. Students, like most people, like to live and be in spaces where they feel comfortable and accepted. Wake is exceptionally white and rich. That often doesn’t lead to student athletes feeling comfortable. I’d venture to say that while Duke is more diverse than Wake, their recruiting suffers from some of the same issues.

For comparison purposes, despite you asserting so, there are zero SEC schools less diverse than Wake. Add that to Wake being small and there just aren’t significant numbers of different racial and ethnic groups. That’s a negative.
Click to expand...
First of all, Auburn for example is having a huge problem with lack of diversity and declining rates of black enrollment. Ole Miss's city of Oxford had to get rid of its Emmett Till memorial because every time it was rebuilt it was vandalized again and it was too expensive so they just gave up. Texas has their fans, team, and coaches sing a racist song after every game. If you think we're suffering on the gridiron because of a lack of diversity in the student population and that's the main reason why... that's just pie in the sky stuff. It really is.
 
NJDeac’22 said:
First of all, Auburn for example is having a huge problem with lack of diversity and declining rates of black enrollment. Ole Miss's city of Oxford had to get rid of its Emmett Till memorial because every time it was rebuilt it was vandalized again and it was too expensive so they just gave up. Texas has their fans, team, and coaches sing a racist song after every game. If you think we're suffering on the gridiron because of a lack of diversity in the student population and that's the main reason why... that's just pie in the sky stuff. It really is.
Click to expand...
I’m certainly not claiming that we’re the only institution suffering from a lack of racial diversity, but I can absolutely say that during my time at Wake, which admittedly was now a long time ago, Black students often felt alone, uncomfortable and “othered” by the student body. I had plenty of recruits stay in our suite when I was in school and we’d always hear, “where are all the Black folks?” Other Black students got understandably sick of everyone asking them if they played a sport. It wasn’t too long ago that Connor wrote an entire article about this. It’s very apparent and real at a school like Wake, where the student body is small anyway and it feels like the only Black men on campus play football. Say what you want, but that’s a challenge for every coach.
 
Wakelaw2006 said:
6 consecutive winning seasons (discounting the COVID year). I'd call that pretty consistent.
Click to expand...
I'm not even going to argue anymore with the person who thinks the reason we aren't winning more in football is we're too white, but this I think is a good point of discussion. Imo, when we schedule at least 3, often 4 cupcakes a year (1 or 2 FCS, 1 or 2 easy FBS teams like Rice or Vandy) plus a couple in league cupcakes like BC, a winning season doesn't cut it as a success. We can get to bowl eligibility most years just by beating the teams that stink. A winning record in ACC play should be the measure of success if I was the AD, and that goes for both revenue sports. .500 in league play is a "solid season", over .500 is a "good season", and competing for a league championship is a "great season".

Some people just have crazy inflated views of Clawson right now. From one poster saying we're the second best program in the league (lol) to posters suggesting it's more ridiculous to question Clawson than Forbes, I just don't understand some of it. He is responsible for reviving a dead program and changing our expectations for what constitutes a good season (5 years ago everyone would have said this year was a very good season, almost no fan would say that now). However, he isn't miles ahead of Forbes in any way, and if Forbes brings this team to the tournament he will have done almost as much, and arguably more than Clawson has in 9 years in 2 years. Don't understand our fanbase idolizing one middle of the ACC program and not the other.
 
awakegirl said:
I’m certainly not claiming that we’re the only institution suffering from a lack of racial diversity, but I can absolutely say that during my time at Wake, which admittedly was now a long time ago, Black students often felt alone, uncomfortable and “othered” by the student body. I had plenty of recruits stay in our suite when I was in school and we’d always hear, “where are all the Black folks?” Other Black students got understandably sick of everyone asking them if they played a sport. It wasn’t too long ago that Connor wrote an entire article about this. It’s very apparent and real at a school like Wake, where the student body is small anyway and it feels like the only Black men on campus play football. Say what you want, but that’s a challenge for every coach.
Click to expand...
Which coach did you talk to about this? I'm curious. Wake indeed has a real problem not only with diversity but with apologizing for racism, but that problem exists at a lot of major football powers in the south and I really don't think it effects recruiting when at all of these schools athletes have become so separated from the student body anyway, which is likely a new development if you went to school years ago.
 
NJDeac’22 said:
I'm just not really sure how the century of suck is relevant now. We currently have some of the best facilities in the ACC and a huge institutional commitment to football that we lacked in the past. I applaud Clawson for his role in creating this commitment to football, but I definitely don't think the 1950s-2000s should be any sort of barometer to judge him against. I think he should be judged against other ACC schools, and with that as a barometer Forbes has been better so far. Glad we have both of them, a credibility thread for either is needless, but yea especially after this season somehow going 3-5 including 0-3 against rivals with the most talented team we've ever had... I'm not one to make Clawson immortal, that's all.
Click to expand...
There have been a lot of responses to this already, can’t reference them all - but football and basketball aren’t the same. Yes, football facilities are vastly improved. But many of the structural impediments that led to historical underperformance remain in place. Wake is still the smallest P5 school. Wake still has high academic standards that restrict the pipeline of Juco talent. Wake still has a high tuition that impacts the number and quality of walk-ons compared to lower cost schools. So on and so forth.

Yes, basketball has some of those hurdles (same academic standards for example). But the small size of a basketball team and the small size of the supporting apparatus (coaching staff, support staff, facilities etc.) relative to football allows for outsized performance relative to the mean with a smaller number of changes to the variables. In other words: Wake getting one academically questionable stud through admissions and onto the basketball team could have us playing for the national title. Whereas Wake would have to get 50 academically questionable studs through the admissions process to move the needle relative to other schools with football in terms of consistent national title contention - a much less likely scenario than the one guy on the bball team).

You almost have to think of it as a coaching equivalent of baseball WAR. And then put it in relative context to other schools playing the same sport. Clawson taking us from an average of 4.5 wins a year to an average of 7 wins a year is a Herculean effort. Forbes taking us back to a place where we’ve been in the past (despite not performing at that level for the past decade) is admirable, but less difficult by comparison.

There’s a reason schools like Villanova, Gonzaga, Georgetown, etc can excel at basketball despite being small and academically rigorous. You could drop UGA or Ohio State’s facilities on campus at any one of those schools and it wouldn’t do anything to make them competitive in football.
 
NJDeac’22 said:
First of all, Auburn for example is having a huge problem with lack of diversity and declining rates of black enrollment. Ole Miss's city of Oxford had to get rid of its Emmett Till memorial because every time it was rebuilt it was vandalized again and it was too expensive so they just gave up. Texas has their fans, team, and coaches sing a racist song after every game. If you think we're suffering on the gridiron because of a lack of diversity in the student population and that's the main reason why... that's just pie in the sky stuff. It really is.
Click to expand...
The ignorance of trying to compare schools like Auburn, Ole Miss, and Texas to Wake Forest is truly amazing.
 
I can’t decide if he(?) is rj with better typing skills or Ph who limits his posts to sports topics. Does he watch comic book movies/shows? He’s apparently from NJ - maybe he has some knowledge about ladling cheese into beards?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top