Wake Forest Athletics
Caldwell Now Has Something To Show
12/14/1999 12:00:00 AM | Football
Dec. 14, 1999
By Sam Walker
Wake Forest's trip to the Aloha Bowl has been seven years in the making for Coach Jim Caldwell. Caldwell has been at the helm of the Wake Forest football program since December of 1992, and in his seventh season the Demon Deacons earned him his first winning season as their head coach and a coveted trip to Hawaii for a matchup against Arizona State of the Pac-10.
Caldwell came to Wake Forest with a plan to build the football program player by player and day by day. He had participated as part of six bowl teams at Penn State as an assistant coach, and he possesses a national championship ring from the 1986 season. Caldwell knew it would take time and patience in order to produce a winning team. He didn't necessarily want it to take seven years before enjoying the spoils that go with a bowl game. Many of his players felt the same.
"This has been an extremely long time coming," senior safety DaLawn Parrish said. "We've worked hard to get to where we are and now we've finally gotten Coach Caldwell over the hump, and I'm just proud of our accomplishment. We just want to represent our university to the best of our abilities."
During those six seasons it wasn't as if Wake Forest wasn't making progress under the direction of "Gentleman" Jim. The Deacons won back-to-back nationally televised games on ESPN in 1997 (N.C. State) and 1998 (Navy) and have twice won in Clemson's infamous Death Valley. Wake Forest defeated defending Big-10 champions Northwestern in 1996 and then beat the Wildcats again in 1997. But Wake Forest never put together a complete season for one reason or another, and Caldwell's 17-49 record weighed rather heavily on the negative side of the scales of college football judgement.
"In this profession you can never win too soon," Caldwell said. "We were anticipating having it sooner, but we could feel ourselves heading in the right direction, and there was positive improvement."
There had been indications two seasons ago that Wake Forest was headed in the right direction when the Deacons went 5-6 overall and 3-5 in the ACC led by a defense that was ranked 10th nationally against the run. But in 1998, Air Force blanked Wake Forest 42-0 in the season opener, and a myriad of injuries to a host of key players led to a 3-8 mark in 1998. In 1999 Wake Forest had something it hadn't had in the past - experience. The Deacons began the season with 26 seniors who came to Wake Forest with one goal - to return a winning football team to Winston-Salem.
"This particular group of guys we've come to depend upon have always said that one day they would get to this point, and they've done that," Caldwell said. "They're such a large group, and that's one reason why we've experienced the success we have - because they have stayed focused. They weren't a bunch of guys who would doubt. We've benefited greatly from this group of seniors."
Wake opened the season with an impressive 34-15 victory over Army and won three of its first four games. The quick start set up a key home contest on Oct. 9 against Maryland. Wake Forest dominated the game until the fourth quarter when Calvin McCall hit running back Lamont Jordan with an improvised 70-yard touchdown pass on a broken play to tie the game at 14. Brian Kopka hit a 19-yard field goal with 3:25 left to lift Maryland over Wake Forest 17-14.
The Deacons suffered a similar fate against Clemson. Wake Forest had held Clemson in check for three quarters, but the offense only produced three points. Clemson's Brandon Streeter replaced starting quarterback Woodrow Dantzler in the fourth quarter and directed the game's only touchdown drive in a 12-3 Clemson victory. By Nov. 13 the Deacons had captured two more victories over the University of Alabama-Birmingham (47-3) and North Carolina (19-3). However, Wake Forest missed an opportunity to guarantee itself a winning season against an injury-plagued Duke team.
Duke scored a school-record 34 points in the first quarter, and Wake Forest couldn't overcome its poor start in a 48-35 loss. Wake Forest entered its final game at 5-5 and had to defeat 14th-ranked Georgia Tech to become bowl eligible. Morgan Kane rushed for 224 yards, and Wake Forest did what many thought it could not by building a 20-0 halftime lead and holding off the Yellow Jackets for a 26-23 victory. The win was the Deacons' second of the season over a top-25 team, and losses by Maryland and N.C. State on the same day (Nov. 20) set up Wake's berth to the Aloha Bowl as the ACC's fifth-place team.
"In this conference pretty much everybody can play with everybody," sophomore center Vince Azzolina said. "It was great to beat a team like that on our home field and see our fans jump around. It was a huge win for the program. To get to where we are now - there's nothing like it in the world. We wanted to do this and now it's just a matter of going to Hawaii.
"This is a place we always felt we should be at my first two years here," Azzolina said. "We've struggled a little bit, but we always felt we should've been playing in the post-season. This year it's finally sweet to be practicing in December."
"Personally this is very gratifying," Parrish said. "Just to be with 20 some odd seniors that came here with me. I'm disappointed that Desmond Clark (who became the ACC's all-time leading receiver as part of Wake's 1998 team) isn't with us here now. He's at the next level, but he came in with us and I'm sure he's with us in spirit. This is unbelievable. I couldn't feel it during the Georgia Tech game, but the next morning I felt the impact of it. I was very emotional about it and cried the next morning. I think that's the biggest game we've won, but I don't think it's the best we've played. It's definitely one of the biggest here in my career."
For the 26 seniors who had persevered through injuries and have enjoyed just 11 victories in the past three seasons, Wake's berth into the Aloha Bowl serves as a just reward for perseverence.
"I think this is a stepping stone," Parrish said. "Unfortunately we could've done better, but it's a beginning. This is a building block for the younger players just to know what it feels like to get here."
For Caldwell, this trip to the Aloha Bowl has been seven years in the making. For senior linebacker Kelvin Moses, this trip is six years in the making. Moses is still at Wake Forest because the NCAA awarded him a second medical redshirt because of a serious knee injury. Senior linebacker Dustin Lyman, who was named to the first team All-ACC this year, survived two injuries to the ACL in his left knee to help Wake Forest turn the corner.
"When you look at the season as a whole going into the Georgia Tech game it was probably a little disappointing," Lyman said. "But after coming out of the final game after beating Georgia Tech I really wouldn't have wanted it any other way because the way it happened was a storybook ending. This makes us a Cinderella team, even though I don't think we deserve that label because we're a lot better than 6-5. But with all the emotion and the way I feel right now I wouldn't trade it for anything.
"I wouldn't feel any better if we were 8-3 and had lost to Georgia Tech. I feel better beating them, going 6-5, and going to the Aloha Bowl. Closing out my career beating the number 14 team in the nation in a game we weren't supposed to win is just storybook material."
Neither Parrish nor Caldwell seemed satisfied with a 6-5 mark or where the Wake Forest football program is at this time. But at the same time they both indicated that this season's results are a major step in the right direction. A victory over Arizona State in the Aloha Bowl would be another large step.
"It gives me a sense of accomplishment, but this is certainly not where we're going to be in the future," Caldwell said. "I think this is a springboard for us. We've put together a good solid platform and we can see the improvement in our program. And the thing you have to do is demonstrate it outside our program with more wins than losses and get involved in a bowl game, so that's what that has done for us. It gives us something to show the kind of work that has been going on in this program and gives us something to get excited about in the future."
