Wake Forest Signing Day Quotes
2/3/2016 12:00:00 AM | Football
Wake Forest Head Football Coach Dave Clawson
Opening Statement…
"National Signing Day and spring games, those are the two dates we are always undefeated. This will run my record to 34-0 in those games. We felt we had a good day. There was not a lot of drama. There was one piece of drama, and it was good drama. It was a successful day. We only sent out 16 letters of intent. We had six mid-year enrollees and every letter of intent we sent out came back signed. That is a good day. They were all back here by 9:05.
"We like the class. If you look at the approach to recruiting, in '14 we took a lot of lineman that year. In '15, we loaded up on skill. I think this year, we felt the bulk of our roster was kind of in place and this year was recruiting needs, immediate needs and projected needs in '17. The positives are we won more battles against other Power 5 schools than in our three years here. I'm not going to go through and say he picked us over them, but in reality, most of these guys had another Power 5 offer or multiple Power 5 offers. It is really encouraging to see to start being able to win those battles. I think there are two reasons for it. Number one is that big building right behind us. We finally have something here, besides our stadium, that we can show recruits to show we are committed to playing high-level football. That building has been an absolute difference-maker for us in two weeks for our current team and showing recruits that football is important at Wake Forest. That has been tremendous. The other is that at this point, a majority of players on our football team, we recruited. They did a great job as hosts and on unofficial visits of selling our vision of the program and they have bought in. I think that hope and that faith helps attract other like-minded players.
"If you look at the list, as a staff we trust our ability to evaluate live. A part of that as you when you work your way up the levels, from I-AA to the MAC, you are not going to recruit guys because everyone else wants them. You have to really be able to evaluate and trust your judgement about what you like and what fits your system. And of the 16 of the 22 guys we signed, we had a chance to coach them in camp. 18 of 22 came to camp and 16 of 22 participated in camp. We have been able to coach these guys and work with them, and we know what they are capable of and the film just backs that up.
"The other thing that sticks out, and that is just the trend in recruiting, it starts earlier and earlier. Players take more and more unofficial visits. Having your base be within a certain radius is very critical. 20 of the 22 players come within a drive, within six hours. The only two who don't are Zander Zimmer from Orlando, and they drove up a bunch of times, and Luke Masterson from Naples. Those are the only two from outside of a six-hour window. It is doing a great job in our backyard and get them to camp. It is getting on guys earlier and getting them to visit multiple times.
"Again, we are really happy with this class. If you look at it, there are 22, 12 on offense. We took three O-linemen, three wide receivers and three tight ends. I think we are anticipating Cam Serigne and Devin Pike getting into their junior year. We want to become more tight end oriented, so we took three at the tight end position. We are going to take a quarterback every year. We took two running backs that we are really excited about. They have different styles, but we are really excited about what we think those guys can bring. We signed the best punter in the country. That isn't just our opinion, that's the national services' opinion. We got the best guy in the country who was in camp after his freshman year in high school and he was maybe 140 pounds soaking wet. He was booming the ball then and he has only gotten better. He is already on campus.
"We signed nine on defense. Clearly the four D-lineman because you need to have depth on the D-line. We really thought we had to get more D-linemen as Banks and Wendell (Dunn) and some of those guys get older. We need to get pass rushers. Right now we feel there is one guy on our football team that effectively rushes the passer, and that is Duke Ejiofor. We think we have three guys who can do that in this class. The secondary is a position where we are going to get older with Brad (Watson), Thomas Brown and Ryan Janvion all becoming seniors. So we signed four guys in the secondary."
On this year's class compared to previous classes...
"I love our class from two years ago, I love last year's class and I love this year's class. Like I said, I think every class you go into with a different strategy. Year one, we realized we were short on linemen here, so we went overboard and took six offensive linemen and a bunch of d-linemen. If you were over six feet tall and over 275-280 pounds and looked good on film, we were going to try to get you and build up the lines. Last year was skill and now, we just know how to recruit for Wake Forest so much better than we did two years ago. We're really figuring out who are good fits for us, what battles we can win and people that value what we really are and when it makes sense for a recruit to pick us. We feel that as a coaching staff, we've learned to recruit for Wake Forest better than we did two years ago or a year ago and we think these guys are good football players and great fits for us and are guys that can make us more competitive in the ACC."
On the depth this class...
"Our numbers are getting right. I've said from day one, I really felt 2016 would be the first year we had a full roster. I do feel that way--I feel like this balances us out. You don't get everybody you wanted--it's never going to be perfect--but I think if you look across the board now, we have good players. We're establishing depth and we're establishing competition. I don't know how to make players better outside of internal competition more than anything. You can have a great weight program and a great conditioning program and great coaches, but what pushes players more than anything are other good players. They know every day that (they need to) go out to that field and give it their very best. We're finally going to have that across the board. We're finally going to have that internal competition in our program. In some cases, the guys from the last two years will withhold these guys and in some cases some of these guys are going to come in here and win jobs. You have to have an internally competitive program before you have that's competitive on Saturdays and I feel the internal competition in our program is finally going to get to a spot that we need it with next year's team."
