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This maybe Haas moment, Grobe is banging on Wake, what thread is this in?

I think when Jim took the job Wake had about 6500 applicants that year and the years following the ACC Championship rose to nearly 12,000.

He definitely played a part in helping to elevate those numbers.
 
Upgrading our facilities would be nice.... but we'd also need a fanbase upgrade if we want to truly leap to the next level in recruiting. A big jump in ticket sales, ad revenue, alumni and other donations.... those things would mean better facilities, more money in the program, more fan buzz for our games, more recruit interest in the program, and have an end result of better recruits signed. I don't think just upgrading a few facilities would trigger better recruits being interested in the program. If Deacon Tower didn't do it upgrades to a weight room wouldn't either. Not saying they'd hurt... but I think there is a ceiling for Wake recruiting with our current level of fan support.

I can't tell whether Grobe got complacent with his recruiting or maybe we just couldn't generate the recruiting interest that we used to under his regime. Two things I firmly believe are 1) the better the fan support, the better the recruits and 2) the program needs more inspiring, vocal, and relentless recruiters who will get in early and often on guys we want and who show interest in us. Hopefully Clawson is, and has guys on his staff who are made from that mold. Go Deacs.
 
Lots of inability to live in reality on this thread. Unless the administration decides Wake is going to become a football school capable of winning 8-9 games every year and does the 45 things necessary to build that type of program, it doesn't matter who the individual head coach is, how many seats are in the stadium, or haw many pushups the offensive line can do. Sure, the chance to back into a BCS bowl is gonna come along every so often, and bowls are gonna come at a max of 25% of the time. But that's it. This isn't about Grobe, or the OC, or the facilities. This is about Wake not prioritizing football. And I'm cool with that. You can't be good at everything.
 
Yes but you can be very very average and still make a bowl game. 6-6 gets you one. Call it 3 wins out of conference and somewhere in Duke, NCSU, BC, Pitt, Cuse, UVA, GT you should find enough wins to go bowling. Win a UNC/Clemson/UM/Ville, VT, FSU every so often.

It's not crazy to think that we should be bowling 75% of the time. With 1 out of those 3 being a decent mid-tier bowl and a shot ever so often for the championship game.
 
HONDO2 said:
Eh ?

Grobe wasn't a 'coach' of anything at Wake. Did he 'coach' something at Ohio ?

I'm sorry but Grobe is making himself sound like a whiner here. The school installed a $1 MILLION FieldTurf practice field, installed it ( $1 MILLION ) at Grove's, built $43 MILLION Deacon Tower , erected maybe the best $3 MILLION Video Board in the country, added a $180,000 ribbon scoreboard on Bridger plus upgraded all the salaries for his assistants. Some of these improvements were done DESPITE the school losing millions in it's endowment during the worst recession this country has experienced in over 75 years.

This article has given my respect for Jim Grobe a severe blow.
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Sorry, but that is not what Jim Grobe needed. You can have Phil Knight & Nike $$$ running around at Wake Forest but if you have Martha Allman as your head of admissions and she doesn't let anybody in school and "they" don't care about athletics, then you are not going to win. Ever notice that coincidental timing of when Pres Hatch came here around 2005 was when the academcis closed even more. The players Coac Grobe had who basically won in 2006-07 & 08 were already admitted. Since then--culture change.
 
DeaconCav06 said:
Wake cannot fit all of it's living alumni in the stadium.
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Wake has been graduating an average of 700 undergraduates per year (fewer earlier, more more recently). 50 years of that is around 35,000 people. Given that the half century class of alumni is way short of a full class, pretty much everybody who graduated from Wake and is alive could fit into Groves. Official capacity is 31,500. Add in the end zone seating, and maybe a few on Deacon Hill, and everybody fits.
 
At the time of the Orange Bowl I remember hearing that we had 58K living alumni.

The class of '06 entered with 1009 students.
 
Just under 950 undergraduates graduated in 2009. There were almost that many graduate school and professional school graduates. Total was over 1800 fo rthe year including December graduates.
 
Listen to the interviews with Duke football players now. There is a reason they are winning more- they are getting more academic exceptions . I can t recall hearing a WFU football player sound dumb in years - maybe ever. I can't say that for basketball , but WFU has always been willing to let in a few dubious students in basketball .
 
wfu22fan said:
Listen to the interviews with Duke football players now. There is a reason they are winning more- they are getting more academic exceptions . I can t recall hearing a WFU football player sound dumb in years - maybe ever. I can't say that for basketball , but WFU has always been willing to let in a few dubious students in basketball .
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The majority of football players I had personal interactions with while at Wake came across as anything but smart. Exceptions were Tommy Bohanon and Nikita (who was not only articulate, but also pretty much the nicest guy ever).
 
wfu22fan said:
Listen to the interviews with Duke football players now. There is a reason they are winning more- they are getting more academic exceptions . I can t recall hearing a WFU football player sound dumb in years - maybe ever. I can't say that for basketball , but WFU has always been willing to let in a few dubious students in basketball .
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You couldn't be more wrong.
 
I just wonder if there has ever been another career sub .500 coach who signed a $23,000,000 contract.
 
TBR said:
Wake gave Grobe unprecedented levels of support. $25M. Now if we promised him facility upgrades when he signed that contract that's one thing, but otherwise, a smart man would have understood that he was choosing a high salary over facility upgrades. Remember, this was before the mega contracts. Think Wake was getting sub $10M (TOTAL) in television revenue at that point.
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This absolutely nails it. Jim Grobe bargained for an unprecedented salary from the smallest school in a BCS league, and one with quite obviously limited financial resources. He knew full well that an extra $15 million allocated to his own salary over 10 years would mean $15 million would not be available for other needs, like facilities upgrades. It is hypocritical in the extreme for Grobe to now argue that Wake failed to spend enough money to support his program when Grobe's own salary was one of the big reasons Wake did not have the money (not to mention Ron Wellman's own million-dollar comp package, but that's another outrage).

This illustrates something else though: Wake should never try to compete with football-factory schools on coaching salaries. Wake will always need to find the up-and-coming mid-major coaches like Clawson, and pay them above mid-major salaries but below the SEC levels. We cannot match SEC-level salaries and should not try. Instead, Wake should be prioritizing putting ACC revenues into facilities and recruiting support, and if a coach like Clawson has a big season and a Tennessee or LSU come calling waving around multiple millions in salary, let him go and then go find the next Clawson. They are out there.
 
FreeStateDeac said:
This absolutely nails it. Jim Grobe bargained for an unprecedented salary from the smallest school in a BCS league, and one with quite obviously limited financial resources. He knew full well that an extra $15 million allocated to his own salary over 10 years would mean $15 million would not be available for other needs, like facilities upgrades. It is hypocritical in the extreme for Grobe to now argue that Wake failed to spend enough money to support his program when Grobe's own salary was one of the big reasons Wake did not have the money (not to mention Ron Wellman's own million-dollar comp package, but that's another outrage).

This illustrates something else though: Wake should never try to compete with football-factory schools on coaching salaries. Wake will always need to find the up-and-coming mid-major coaches like Clawson, and pay them above mid-major salaries but below the SEC levels. We cannot match SEC-level salaries and should not try. Instead, Wake should be prioritizing putting ACC revenues into facilities and recruiting support, and if a coach like Clawson has a big season and a Tennessee or LSU come calling waving around multiple millions in salary, let him go and then go find the next Clawson. They are out there.
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You guys just aren't getting the big picture. It does not matter what we spend on the program if we do not start making some academic exceptions and getting some athletes into our athletic programs [plural], we can forget having much of anything in football, basketball or baseball.

We stopped admitting the jucos that were helping our baseball program throughout the 90's, helping George Greer win 3 ACC titles. We checked out the California juco system's books & curriculum to see if it was up to par, even though those players were fitting at wake & graduating as well as any Wake student, cut them off unless they would have been admitted out of high school. So now basically a juco coming to Wake won't get their credits transferred & still has to come here for 4 years to get a degree, even though they have been to school for 2 years already. This simply also hurts football & basketball from filling in some stop gaps when needed, plus using something all baseball programs use in normal recruiting. You have to have this for baseball when you only have 11.7 schollies to divvie up. Kids & parents are not going to want to have to pay for 4-6 years to get a degree, especially toting our $60,000 freight.

So we are our own worst enemy if we won't make any academic exceptions and put great players on the field that can compete against the rest of the ACC. Duke is showing they can do it & now mess with their academic reputation. Vandy has shown it can be done in football. Georgetown has done it for years in basketball. We need to also!
 
Find out what Stanford is doing and do that.
 
What does writing checks have to do with academic exceptions?
 
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