Saturday was, for Wake fans, more like a Sadderday that got sadder and sadder as the day passed not nearly fast enough into night.
What better word to describe all things pertaining on this day to Deacon football and basketball?
Sad.
Sad for those playing and almost as sad for anyone who cared enough to watch Jim Grobe’s football program get cuffed around at Notre Dame and Jeff [Redacted]’s basketball team stage one of the most embarrassing face plants ever for a program all-to-well-known for pratfalls.
The football team probably played about as well as it could, which excuses only the effort from a team just not good enough to compete against that opponent in that setting, but not the entrenched mediocrity that has sprouted and apparently taken root since the halcyon Riley Skinner-led days of 2006-08.
Only a home upset against a resurgent Vanderbilt next week will avert a fourth-straight losing season after another late-season falter. A victory would give the Deacons a chance to do what it couldn’t do in 2011 -- have a winning season to show for its bowl bid.
It’s a salvage operation at best, an attempt to come away with something worth keeping.
The question for [Redacted] remains, can he build anything worth having out of the ashes of the last two seasons? So far every piece of evidence that he might – like the competitive spirit shown in Friday’s hard-fought loss toConnecticut– is quickly engulfed in the flames of another meltdown.
In his 66th game as Wake Forest’s head coach, the Deacons trailed Iona by 37 points in the first half. This is a team that has been together since July, that has practiced hard since mid-October, made a two-game trip through Canada, played an exhibition game and opened its season more than a week ago against Radford.
On Sadderday, the Deacons looked more like a group of strangers who had been hastily assembled because Iona needed an opponent when the real team had failed to show. And it looked like a group of strangers with no coach.
They couldn’t catch a pass, they couldn’t make a layup, they couldn’t defend the perimeter and they couldn’t – or at least wouldn’t – hustle down court fast enough to stop another snowbird dunk.Iona may be good; it’s hard to tell yet. But my guess is the Gaels will never again this season look as good as they did in the first half last night.
The challenge [Redacted] faces is to blend two of the best players in the ACC, senior C.J. Harris and junior Travis McKie with seven freshmen. The problem is that Harris and McKie played nothing like two of the best players in the ACC against Iona. If anything, they looked like they were playing their third game of college basketball as well.
Maybe Grobe will rally his troops to beat Vanderbilt next week and win a bowl game to finish 7-6. Maybe [Redacted] will reassemble his team in time to beat Mercer tomorrow for seventh place of the Paradise Jam, and use that victory to caulk the leaky boat that has become Wake Forest basketball.
Maybe I’ll win the lottery. I see where Powerball is up to $250 million.
Until then, I get the feeling I haven’t experienced my last Sadderday. I’ve seen little reason to expect otherwise.
P.S. Kudos to John Dell for the outstanding job he did at Notre Dame. I can only hope the experience was better than the game.
