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Wake's athletic performance under Ron Wellman's leadership

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thedeacfan

Ricky Peral
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I pulled the Director's Cup standings from their website. The completed results for the last 19 years are posted. This year's standings will make 20 years. This year's scores are on the site but they are not complete so they were not included in the info below.

Director's Cup Summary...
Comparing Wake's scores to our counterparts in the ACC:

Only once in the last 19 years has Wake finished in the upper third (barely) of the ACC.
Wake has finished in the bottom half of the conference 13 of the 19 years.
Wake has finished in the bottom third of the conference 9 of the 19 years.
Wake has finished last in the conference for the last two years in a row.

Obviously Ron Wellman is not being judged based on Wake's performance in the Director's Cup...

http://www.nacda.com/directorscup/nacda-directorscup-previous-scoring.html

Mr. Wellman has been successful at deflecting criticism for our poor performance in the Director's Cup. This is apparently accomplished by attributing the poor performance to the fact that Wake does not participate in as many sports as other schools. Not surprisingly, this excuse is only somewhat valid and is primarily just more AD "spin". Since a maximum of 20 sports (10 male & 10 female) can be used to calculate the point totals, a school that participates in more than 20 sports has more opportunities to use a better performing team in place of a lower performing team. However, the emphasis and weighting of the scoring system is on WINNING. The number of participation points awarded is minimal. A school like Wake that does NOT have winning as a priority, is never going to score well regardless of how many sports they participate in.

For the last two years 5 of 12 ACC schools have participated in less than 20 sports. GaTech & Miami had 17 sports, Wake had 18 sports, and Clemson & Florida St. had 19 sports.

School#SportsDirector's Cup 2011Director's Cup 2012
GaTech175972
Miami175159
WFU187492
Clemson194754
Florida St19 9 5

Out of the 12 schools in the ACC, Wake was the poorest performing both years. Florida State had only one more sport than Wake, but finished in the Top 10 nationally both years. Obviously you do not have to participate in 20+ sports to score well. It is more important that you do well in the sports for which you do compete. In other words, Wake's poor scoring for the last two years has had much more to do with the fact that our Athletic Department is content to field non-competitive teams. Last year, we finished in the bottom half of the conference in 15 of the 18 sports in which we participated. Year before last, we finished in the bottom half of the conference in 13 of the 18 sports in which we participated.

Such a broad, pervasive, and consistent pattern of failure across so many fields of endeavor can only be attributed to decisions being made at the top. Ron Wellman is FAILING to field championship caliber athletes and teams. Given what we are seeing with the basketball program, is fielding championship caliber teams even a goal anymore? Are Wake athletes now supposed to be content with getting a "participation trophy"?

http://grfx.cstv.com/photos/schools/acc/genrel/auto_pdf/2012-13/misc_non_event/1213accrecordbook.pdf
 
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This is a terrible indictment of Wellman's job performance.
 
:golfclap: Nice summary and information. We just suck. And no one cares.
 
What's the problem? That looks historically competitive to me.

#culture = excuses, hypocrisy, and mediocrity
 
The myth of Wellman's greatness is entirely built on four things:
1. Success by coaches he inherited in men's basketball, baseball, field hockey, men's soccer, and women's golf.
2. Skip's performance until the WVU game.
3. Grobe's performance through 2008.
4. Facilities

Everything else has been a dumpster fire. He's on his 2nd baseball coach since Greer and we've only been to the tournament twice since 2002. Others who follow baseball can chip in, but Walter has no tournament appearances in 3 seasons and tied for next to worst conference record this year.

When you think about how long Caldwell and Charlene Curtis coached here and how several sports have never even been contenders under Wellman, it's a shame he has the stature he has for such limited success.
 
This is a bit misleading. We had an incredible athletic year in 2006-2007 (Orange Bowl, Men's Soccer and FH make final 4, Men's tennis makes sweet 16, all tennis and golf teams score points, men's and women's track both score points) and finished 4th in the ACC in the director's cup. There are some schools in the ACC that offer alot more sports than us and we have a ceiling of about 4th.

You can score points in 10 sports for men and women and we only offer 16 sports (T&F you can take the highest of indoor or outdoor, but only one).

Not to say that our athletic programs haven't taken a nosedive, but it hurts the argument to minimize what had been strong performance in the past.
 
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ChrisL68 said:
This is a bit misleading. We had an incredible athletic year in 2006-2007 (Orange Bowl, Men's Soccer and FH make final 4, Men's tennis makes sweet 16, all tennis and golf teams score points, men's and women's track both score points) and finished 4th in the ACC in the director's cup. There are some schools in the ACC that offer alot more sports than us and we have a ceiling of about 4th.

Not to say that our athletic programs haven't taken a nosedive, but it hurts the argument to minimize what had been strong performance in the past.
Click to expand...

"This is misleading. We had that one awesome year 6 years ago."

LOWF
 
OK, How about 2007-2008. We went to a bowl game, made the tourney in men's hoops, won the national title in men's soccer and made the final four in FH and all 4 country club sports scored points (golf and tennis) and we finished 5th in the ACC.

It has nothing to do with LOWF. Just an understanding of mathematics. Using that metric, this year was a barely acceptable level of performance.
 
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ChrisL68 said:
This is a bit misleading. We had an incredible athletic year in 2006-2007
Click to expand...

In about a month there will have been 8 thousand or more students who have graduated from Wake Forest since then.
 
myDeaconmyhand said:
In about a month there will have been 8 thousand or more students who have graduated from Wake Forest since then.
Click to expand...

And that has nothing to do with the point I was making.

Wake is always going to have a lower director's cup ceiling due to the # of sports offerings. That year we finished 4th was an incredible athletics year for the school. That's pretty close to our ceiling.

Now, however, we are falling below our peers that offer the same number of sports, and that isn't good. It's been a steady decline since then.
 
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ChrisL68 said:
This is a bit misleading. We had an incredible athletic year in 2006-2007 and finished 4th in the ACC in the director's cup. There are some schools in the ACC that offer alot more sports than us and we have a ceiling of about 4th.

Not to say that our athletic programs haven't taken a nosedive, but it hurts the argument to minimize what had been strong performance in the past.
Click to expand...

Did you read the OP? It is not misleading at all. Saying that our "ceiling" is "4th" place is LOWF thinking at it's best (or worst). Florida State participates in only one more sport than we do (19 to our 18) and has finished in the Top 10 nationally for the last three years. Successful performance is the key to the Director's Cup standings and under Ron Wellman the vast majority of our teams do NOT succeed.

The only thing that participating in more sports does for you is give you more opportunities to get higher performance based scores. That can only happen if a team successfully "performs". It would be interesting to compare our scores to, for instance, what Virginia's Director's Cup score would be based on their bottom 20 (out of 25) sports. I'll bet that even under those circumstances, Virginia would still clean our clock. (25 is the most sports that any ACC team participated in.)

I say again. When it comes to Director's Cup scoring; it is far more important that you do well in the sports for which you participate as opposed to participating in more sports. That being the case, there is NO reason for Wake to not be much more competitive in the Director's Cup competition.

BTW - In 2006-2007 we actually finished in 5th place in the ACC. And in 2007-2008 we finished in 7th place among the 12 ACC schools.
 
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ChrisL68 said:
OK, How about 2007-2008. We went to a bowl game, made the tourney in men's hoops, won the national title in men's soccer and made the final four in FH and all 4 country club sports scored points (golf and tennis) and we finished 5th in the ACC.

It has nothing to do with LOWF. Just an understanding of mathematics. Using that metric, this year was a barely acceptable level of performance.
Click to expand...

You're overlapping data
 
Does Wake offer a full scholarship allotment in T&F?
 
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Performance in non-revenue sports has never mattered under Wellman as long as I've followed the Deacs. We just really stink at football and basketball now too.
 
Isn't the only way to truely compare apples to apples is to take the sports Wake participated in and use the exact same sports for the other ACC schools scores?
 
ChrisL68 said:
This is a bit misleading. We had an incredible athletic year in 2006-2007 (Orange Bowl, Men's Soccer and FH make final 4, Men's tennis makes sweet 16, all tennis and golf teams score points, men's and women's track both score points) and finished 4th in the ACC in the director's cup. There are some schools in the ACC that offer alot more sports than us and we have a ceiling of about 4th.

You can score points in 10 sports for men and women and we only offer 16 sports (T&F you can take the highest of indoor or outdoor, but only one).

Not to say that our athletic programs haven't taken a nosedive, but it hurts the argument to minimize what had been strong performance in the past.
Click to expand...

I cannot confirm your information in bold on the Director's Cup website and do not understand why that would be the case. (If possible, please provide a link to this information.)

However, even assuming that your T&F info is correct, it changes nothing in the table. All of the teams in the table compete in men's and women's, I&O T&F. That would mean (assuming you are correct) that Florida State has been in the Top 10 nationally for three years running with only 17 sports. Meanwhile we are DFL in the ACC with 16...

If Florida State is achieving a those results with only 17 sports, it further proves my point. When it comes to Director's Cup scoring; it is far more important that you do well in the sports for which you participate as opposed to participating in more sports.

Saying that our "ceiling" is "4th place" in the ACC is still major LOWF.
 
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Not surprisingly, you are missing the point. The point is that in those two awesome athletics years, we were barely top half of the ACC in the director's cup.

It takes a very good athletics year to get us in the top half of the director's cup.

You are inferring that because of this I am finding the current state of our athletics program acceptable, and that's a big strawman.
 
No, I'm not. I'm making fun of the fact you think those were great years. The fact that we were barely two half shows that they weren't. We should have years like that more regularly.
 
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