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Why are Wake fans so angry?

Kent's post breaks down why I've been angry about Wake athletics for a long time. The tolerance for mediocrity among our fanbase is maddening. It took outright failure to get any movement toward significant change. I fear that we'll settle back into old ways once basketball gets back to NIT levels and we limp into a bowl with a 6-6 record over a weak schedule.

Great work, Kent.
 
When I think about Wellman's obsession with culture I am reminded of Robert Pirsig who was driven to the brink of insanity trying to define "quality," as documented in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

But that is superficial. Wellman's pursuit of culture, whatever that may mean in the context of Wake Forest sports, is a ruse. Pirsig's aspirations were much more noble, though doomed.

Pirsig would probably go the route of Hemingway if he were a Wake fan.
 
Wakeforest22890 said:
Like I said, it wasn't scientific, but the people who post on these boards are pretty much all top 10% fans of Wake Forest. Just by the nature of registering a name to read the site you're probably a top 10% fan. I think there were around 100 responses to the poll and around 50 of the people, out of this group of top 10% of Wake fans, said that they would trade FBS status for basketball success. Furthermore the question was a complete thought experiment not meant to actually occur, as was made clear in the question (which in and of itself was phrased appropriately and quite clearly) and I don't think that anybody actually believes that this trade is possible.

The point of using the poll was to show that even extremely passionate fans love basketball so much they would trade football success at the FBS level for a consistently competitive basketball team.
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Good lord, I don't care why you quoted the results of that poll, I would never share it with anyone outside the OGBoards circle. It makes us look like idiots, for one thing. For another, it could not be any less scientific and the results mean absolutely nothing.
 
For a lot of fans the anger has turned into indifference or apathy. Then there is enlightenment when you realize there is no value or benefit to being a Wake fan and the freedom you gain by eliminating your emotional attachment to Wake sports. Wake plays a game....don't care it wasn't on tv anyway and Wake predictably sucked. Not wasting my time watching Wake affords me more time to do something more productive and fun.
 
scooter84 said:
Good lord, I don't care why you quoted the results of that poll, I would never share it with anyone outside the OGBoards circle. It makes us look like idiots, for one thing. For another, it could not be any less scientific and the results mean absolutely nothing.
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How does it make anybody look like an idiot? It was a poll question and people answered it. Furthermore the boards were at no point cited.

People on here want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to be credited as a vocal majority of the fan base when 100 people contribute financially to something anti-[Redacted] or Wellman, but then when 100 people on here are polled on something the poll is meaningless and I should instead say "the majority of fans" when referencing things I see on this board. Well which one is it?
 
jhmd2000 said:
Wake fans endured Jim Caldwell, Bob Staak and the worst half century of unpaid football ever played. Winning cures a lot of ills, but the contemporary angst is about being misled. Management has a credibility gap, which has turned into an immunity to accountability, which turns into helplessness...which aggravates the pain of losing.
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I'm late to the party here, but this sums it up perfectly for me.
 
Imagine if one of us had given an employee a contract extension, thus needlessly putting our company on the hook for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of dollars (anyone know the exact figure Wake paid out to Dino over the last few years), right before we turn around and fire him. That sort of incompetence would be grounds for dismissal. And then we compound it by hiring the most unqualified, least personable person we could find, for one of the most important jobs at the company. And after all this we keep our job. It's like nothing happened, the contract extension right before the firing, the hire that everyone considered awful from the start, the constant arrogance reflected in things like the decision to quit taking live calls ("this is OUR show")...There has been zero accountability. And the litany of excuses from the Wellman apologists ring hollow.
 
I guess the first portion could be explained away if the employee did something after the contract extension that got him fired for cause, but again we don't know what the exact situation with Dino is or was (and likely never will).
 
Wakeforest22890 said:
I guess the first portion could be explained away if the employee did something after the contract extension that got him fired for cause, but again we don't know what the exact situation with Dino is or was (and likely never will).
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The slanderous character assassination of Dino, in an attempt to take the heat off Wellman for his awful decisionmaking, is another thing that pisses me off.
 
Wakeforest22890 said:
The point of the article wasn't to articulate my own personal viewpoint on Ron Wellman, it was to convey the fact that I think most of the disdain for Ron Wellman stems from the fact that basketball is so important to Wake and he hired Jeff [Redacted]. I cited the boards because it had a readily available poll about how much [Redacted] is disliked as well as to show that basketball is in fact extremely important to Wake fans as compared to football. It's clearly not scientific, but it articulated the two points rather well I thought.
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I disagree that its solely about his hiring of [Redacted]. Wellman is and always has been a huge prick. To say he was beloved during the Orange Bowl is pretty generous. Anyone who has had personal interactions with him would not love the guy, I guarantee that.
 
The real issue is the lack of Hope.

Everyone knew we would struggle after Dino and have some down years. Skip was such a big personality that he could create hope and a vision for the future. He won the ACC regular season his first year and said " I was so grateful that the team bought it to what we were doing and where we were going". ( He was also thankful for Josh Howard!)

The real issue with Buzz is that he may be the best coach in the world, but nobody cares because he has no personality and hasn't been able to project hope or a vision for where he wanted to take the team. If we had hired a great young coach with a personality who knew how to interact with the fan base, we would all be celebrating our future, rather than secretly or not so secretly hoping to lose all of our basketball games to force a coaching change.
 
I can't believe people are still talking about Dino Gaudio. This really has nothing to do with Dino Gaudio anymore. That's an easy talking point for the media to digest and seize on, and it does everybody a disservice.
 
BobStackFan4Life said:
Imagine if one of us had given an employee a contract extension, thus needlessly putting our company on the hook for hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of dollars (anyone know the exact figure Wake paid out to Dino over the last few years), right before we turn around and fire him. That sort of incompetence would be grounds for dismissal. And then we compound it by hiring the most unqualified, least personable person we could find, for one of the most important jobs at the company. And after all this we keep our job. It's like nothing happened, the contract extension right before the firing, the hire that everyone considered awful from the start, the constant arrogance reflected in things like the decision to quit taking live calls ("this is OUR show")...There has been zero accountability. And the litany of excuses from the Wellman apologists ring hollow.
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This doesn't bother me; it's just the reality of modern revenue sport collegiate athletics. If the coach is not entrenched, meaning everyone knows a new deal or extension is coming so there's no hurry, then it can be used as a negative recruiting tool not to have a coach "locked up" for the foreseeable future. And I mean foreseeable future through the lens of a highschool junior or senior. The mistake with Dino wasn't the hire or the extension; it was not putting the interim tag on him. Once that label was off the table, then the extension made sense.
 
Wake will always live in the shadow of UNC and Duke re: basketball, it's just the way it is. That's not LOWF, that's the way it would be for all but a handful of other teams in the country (Kentucky and Kansas?). Not saying we can't or won't be national powers, but we will never have the history of a UNC or Duke.

For a head coach coming into that job, that HAS to be an immense amount of pressure...you've already pretty much failed before you've begun. So Wellman makes the Bzz hire, and truly hopes it works out. He sticks with his guns even when it starts looking like it was a bad hire...and is now at the point of making the fans and other coaches expect below-average results on the floor. That serves two purposes: 1) Makes it so the fans are incredibly pleased with even a mediocre season, and even more enthused about an above average season, and 2) Makes the HC position at Wake Forest appear slightly more appealing due to the already lowered standards and it keeps the giant monkeys known as UNC and Duke basketball off your back for at least a few years while you work to build your own foundation at Wake.



The more I think about it, the more it seems like that HAS to be what Wellman is doing. Had he made a good hire after Dino (say an up and comer who could keep the fans enthused and excited) and then that coach failed, it would be like a desecration of the memory of Skip/Wake Basketball. At least with hiring an unproven guy in [Redacted], fans won't expect deep tourney runs and final fours right away, and you always have the fall guy in Dino to blame.

In terms of Wellman's viewpoint, it seems like a win-win (assuming he is able to make a hire after [Redacted] that can return the program to respectability and doesn't cost him his job)....he buys time, looks like a genius if [Redacted] actually pans out, and can always blame the other guy if it fails. And there's nowhere to go but up from the shithole we've fallen into.
 
Wakeforest22890 said:
How does it make anybody look like an idiot? It was a poll question and people answered it. Furthermore the boards were at no point cited.

People on here want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to be credited as a vocal majority of the fan base when 100 people contribute financially to something anti-[Redacted] or Wellman, but then when 100 people on here are polled on something the poll is meaningless and I should instead say "the majority of fans" when referencing things I see on this board. Well which one is it?
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Why would you reference your pathetic LOWF poll? It completely conflicts with your Wake fans want everything after the OB thesis.
 
How the hell is that a LOWF poll? It just showed how much Wake fans love basketball which is the thesis of the whole thing: Wake fans blame Wellman for the [Redacted] issue more than anything because they love basketball. Football could never inspire such anger because most Wake fans don't give a flying fuck about football relative to basketball. The poll shows that quite well even if it's small sample size.

The "Wake fans want everything" after the OB was just a general commentary on how Wake fans felt about being good at all athletics. I do see what you're saying about it being slightly conflicting, I was just using the poll to show something else - that Wake fans truly still love basketball more than anything.
 
No. Your poll showed that Wake fans would be content with basketball in the 90s and even worse football than what we had under Caldwell. Now you are publicizing that Wake fans don't care about being competitive in football.
 
Sums it up for me.


YankeeInAtlanta said:
For a lot of fans the anger has turned into indifference or apathy. Then there is enlightenment when you realize there is no value or benefit to being a Wake fan and the freedom you gain by eliminating your emotional attachment to Wake sports. Wake plays a game....don't care it wasn't on tv anyway and Wake predictably sucked. Not wasting my time watching Wake affords me more time to do something more productive and fun.
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I haven't read all the responses so this has probably already been said in some form or another, but here is why I'm angry.

The administration at Wake Forest does not set winning at the highest level as one of its goals. They use a number of excuses from school size to academic difficulty to justify failing to compete. There seem to be no consequences for failure.

Most of the things that are listed as a negative can easily be spun as a positive. The evidence for this is our past success in those sports and by the success of similar schools to Wake around the nation today.
 
Wakeforest22890 said:
How does it make anybody look like an idiot? It was a poll question and people answered it. Furthermore the boards were at no point cited.

People on here want to have their cake and eat it too. They want to be credited as a vocal majority of the fan base when 100 people contribute financially to something anti-[Redacted] or Wellman, but then when 100 people on here are polled on something the poll is meaningless and I should instead say "the majority of fans" when referencing things I see on this board. Well which one is it?
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It's been discussed plenty, but, anyone who voted for any possibility of moving football to FCS, under any hypothetical situation, is an idiot. If the poll had been a choice of going 3-8 in football for the foreseeable future and being good in basketball vs good in football and bad in basketball, that would have still shown the preference for basketball over football without creating the ridiculous, impossible hypothetical of going to FCS...
 
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