Pete Thamel, Senior College Sports Insider
Wake Forest head football coach Dave Clawson is resigning after 11 seasons and is expected to remain at the school as a consultant, sources told ESPN on Monday.
The advisory role will include working with Athletic Director John Currie, the school’s president and the Board of Trustees on athletic issues. Clawson is also expected to play a major role in the school’s fundraising efforts, sources told ESPN.
Clawson has led Wake Forest to seven straight bowl games, including top-10 finishes in 2021 and 2022. It’s the highest AP poll ranking in Wake Forest history.
Sources told ESPN that Clawson made the decision to resign because he felt it was time. Sources compared the decision to recent moves by Virginia basketball coach Tony Bennett and former Washington football coach Chris Peterson, who resigned in part because of changing times in the sport.
Clawson has been considering the decision in recent weeks and communicated with school officials about it before officially notifying them Monday, sources said.
Clawson, 57, is expected to take a year off to recuperate after serving as head coach for 25 of the past 26 seasons. He is the only coach in NCAA history to lead four different Division I programs (Fordham, Richmond, Bowling Green and Wake Forest) to double-digit wins in a season. He turned down interest in multiple head coaching positions over the years, choosing to stay at Wake Forest.
Clawson is considered the school’s best modern coach. He left with a 67-69 record, the best winning percentage among Wake Forest football coaches since the school joined the ACC in 1953. He led Wake Forest to seven of the 17 bowl games in school history and five of the school’s 11 bowl games. Bowl wins.
Clawson’s highlights include leading Wake Forest to the ACC Championship Game in 2021, leading the Demon Deacons to three consecutive wins over Florida State from 2019 to 2021, and defeating Texas A&M in the Belk Bowl .
Wake Forest’s headwinds in the current college football era over the past two years have complicated the way Clawson builds his team. He redshirted players and relied on continuity and player development as competitive advantages. The inability to financially retain top talent due to the NIL and the transfer portal diminishes the effectiveness of Wake Forest’s advantage.
Clawson’s frustrations are many and he alluded to Wake Forest’s NIL restrictions as the Demon Deacons went 4-8 in each of the past two seasons.
Earlier this year, after a loss to Louisiana State in the Sun Belt, Clawson expressed his frustration: “To fix a problem, you need a lot of money. And we recruited the guys we could afford.”
Wake Forest members believe that in some games this season, individual players from opposing teams have had larger NIL deals than Wake Forest’s entire roster. NIL data is not public, making such claims difficult to verify, but Wake’s NIL is considered to be near the bottom of the 17-team ACC.
During the 2023 season, Wake Forest star quarterback Sam Hartman left to play his final season at Notre Dame. Clawson blamed Notre Dame’s video tribute to Hartman on Senior Night, saying: “This is a guy that we recruited and developed and they put a video on him saying, ‘We will always love you. ‘”
He added: “You only dated him for a few months. It couldn’t be love. We were the ones who loved him. We were with him for five years. You rented him for a season… when When that video came on, it was like, ‘Oh my God, this is where college football is.'”
The theme of those comments has come up multiple times this season as Wake has lost key defensive players to the transfer portal or early entry into the NFL draft because they couldn’t afford market value. Overall, Wake Forest has lost more than a dozen starters to the portal or draft over the past two and a half years.
In his recent comments about Mack Brown’s departure, Clawson inadvertently provided some insight into a factor that influenced his own decision.
“This is just the direction things are going,” Clawson said in late November. “A lot of players now, if they don’t get the exact role they want in year two or three, are likely to leave. In some cases, it works for them, but in other cases it doesn’t.
“I believe that for a lot of the players who left, if they stayed another year and were patient, their role here could be what they wanted it to be.”
