Wake Forest Athletics
Weekly Press Conference & Video: Nov. 19
11/19/2019 2:06:00 PM | Football
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. - Wake Forest head coach Dave Clawson and student-athletes Kendall Hinton and Jack Freudenthal met with the media Tuesday (Nov. 19) at the team's weekly press conference luncheon to discuss the Deacs' upcoming game with Duke
Head Coach Dave Clawson
Opening Statement...
"Wrapping up Clemson, it was obviously a game we didn't play well. I'll share with you what I shared with the team. A result like that is never acceptable. It's so easy to say it was Clemson and they are this and they are that, but when you go back and watch the film, the amount of times we beat ourselves and our inability to execute. It started from the get-go. We allowed that first punt return that gave them a short field. We threw a pick that gave them a short field. We settled in there. We got the recovery of the punt that they fumbled, but we have to score seven and not three. We have the ball right before the half and we throw a perfect slant to a wide-open receiver who works a great release move, and doesn't catch it. That allows the next 14 points to happen and instead of it being a 17-3 game at halftime, it is 31-3. Even on those plays, we had a safety who didn't have his eyes in the right place. We had a safety that lost leverage. Clemson is as good of a team as we have played against in my time here. You make those mistakes against anybody, you get beat, but when you do against a team like Clemson, they are going to score touchdowns. Clemson executed well and we didn't. A lot of things we did are fixable and correctable. That's why we practice. We watch the film on Sunday and make the corrections. Whether you win a last-second, emotional game or lose a game like that on Saturday, you have to move forward.
"It becomes easy to move forward. We a very important game this Saturday night under the lights at BB&T Field. We play Duke for the 100th time in the history of the series. It is a series that started back in 1889. It is an opportunity to be undefeated in the Big 4, which is really important to us. It was one of the exciting things of the schedule this year was we had all three Big 4 teams at home. If we win this one, it will only be the eighth time in our history, and the first time since '07, that we went 3-0 against the Big 4. It is also Senior Day. This group has a chance to leave as either the most or second-most successful senior class in the history of Wake Forest football. I think these guys deserve a sendoff. We would love to have a great homefield advantage. This senior class has done a lot for our program. These are guys who came here and either suffered through or committed to Wake Forest after a 3-9 season. Now they are the first senior class in the history of the school to go to four straight bowl games. We hope we have a good crowd for a very important game. We still have a lot of our goals alive this year. Obviously, one of them is off the table after the Virginia Tech game, but a lot of them are still alive. It is a very important game for our team and we play a good football team.
"Duke is always one of the best-coached, fundamentally sound, disciplined football teams that we play. On offense, they are a talented team. Their quarterback, Harris, can beat you with his arm or his legs. He is their second-leading rusher and a tremendous athlete. He is certainly capable of playing at a very high level. At running back, they have two guys, Jackson and Durant, that have combined for over 900 yards. At tight end and receiver, they are big. If you look at the depth chart, there are guys 6-4, 6-4 and 6-2 and present some matchup issues. The O-line is a mix of experienced guys and young talent.
"Duke, overall, is a very experienced football team. If you look at the two-deep, they have 26 juniors and seniors. On defense, they start nine juniors and seniors. It is four seniors, five juniors and two sophomores, who are both redshirts. This is a very experienced unit. They're sixth in the ACC in total defense. Last week's score was very misleading. That was a tight, one-score game and then Duke threw a pick-six and had two other turnovers that gave Syracuse a short field. So that went from a competitive, one-score, 14-6 game to 35-6 because of the turnovers. Hopefully those are things we can generate, but you can never count on.
"This is three years in a row of the exact same matchup. It is a seven-win team vs. a six-loss team. You have a team that has a chance for a really good season and a special year against a team that is fighting for its life. If they don't win it, they aren't going to a bowl. I said this to our football team, I don't think the last two years that the better team won this game. I think in '17 we were the better team, but Duke came here 5-6 and had to win to get to a bowl, and we turned it over twice, they hit a double-move and had a long punt return and they found a way to beat us on our home field. Last year, we kind of flipped the script a little bit. We were 5-6 and had to win to go to a bowl and they were pretty banged up at the time and we won a game we had to in order to continue our season. It is almost the exact same script as the last two years, the only difference being it is the second-to-last game rather than the last game. We expect a tough, hard-fought game. We need to get better. We have to do a better job coaching, a better job playing and a better job executing. If we don't do those things, it won't be a good night for us on Saturday. Duke is certainly a very capable football team. All you have to do is watch their Virginia Tech game. They have lost two heartbreakers to Pitt and Carolina, or otherwise this could be a seven-win team that we are facing."
On the team's goals for the remaining three games of the season:
"I think the challenge at this part of the year is always that the season is long. We've been going at this for three and a half months. You always have these younger players that we're counting on and this is the hardest thing that we've ever done. They are holding onto that rope for dear life and I'm sure part of them is saying, 'Geez, how many more games do we have to do this?' What we do here at Wake Forest isn't easy. We get up early in the morning, we have meetings that start early, then the kids go to class all day and then they go to study hall. It's not easy. It's what they signed up for but saying you're going to do it and then living it for the first time isn't easy. And then you have your older guys and that this could be the last three football games of their life and they are very, very aware of what's on the line: winning the Big Four championship, getting to double-digit wins, going to a top bowl destination. They're very aware of what's in the moment and the key to the end of these seasons is do the older guys and the leadership on your football team get the younger guys to play for them. You'll never know when you'll be in this position again. It's hard to be in this position but I don't know when we're going to have a chance to play three of the Big Four teams in a season and win the first two. It's not easy to accomplish and our theme for the season is, 'sense of urgency' and I think as the season winds down, there are certain goals you've accomplished and those that are now out of reach but a lot of other things to play for and those that are, whenever teams can create that sense of urgency and purpose, you're successful. The 2018 Wake Forest Football team created that sense of urgency when we were 4-5 and whether the 2019 football team at 7-3 can create that sense of urgency, we'll see. There's only so much as a coach that you can preach. Either there's an internal buy-in and that's self-motivation or that they succumb to human nature and it's tiring, we can't win the ACC anymore; we just got blown out by Clemson. It doesn't matter. Good football teams and good football players show up and have consistency to them and that's certainly our challenge this week."
On the seniors and what they accomplished to set and even raise the standards for the football program:
"They came to Wake Forest when there were very low expectations for our program. We didn't have facilities, we had just come off of six or seven consecutive losing seasons and this group, when they got here, was a little bit of a divided locker room. There were some older guys that quite frankly didn't love football. Now we had some older guys that loved football like Brandon Chubb, Marquel Lee, Jordan Garside, and Ryan Janvion. We had some really great kids and good football players in some of those classes but there was a lot of those early groups that didn't love football, they didn't like practice, they didn't like meetings, they didn't like to watch extra film and so when this group got here, a lot of those players had to make that decision, 'Do I hang with this group that loves football or do I go with these guys that have other priorities and not help our football team?' This senior group that's walking on Saturday made the decision that football was going to be important to them. Justin Strnad, Cade Carney, all of those O-linemen. It's a great senior group and nine of them a year ago could have graduated and transferred and played somewhere else and they'd be starting anywhere else in the country and they felt so invested in our program that they came back and that's why we are in this position. I love that group, I'm thankful for them and I hope they get a proper sendoff. To not have a great crowd on Saturday for what this game means, we need our fan base to show up. We really do. We've got to have that stadium; especially our home stands packed and send these guys out the right way. Quite frankly, doing that generates future success. When you have a good crowd and a recruit sees it, it helps get the next recruit and when you don't have it, it hurts so we want to be in this position every year when it's an ongoing process and our fan base is very much a part of it. We're very aware from the part in '18, we didn't play well at home and I think this year we've corrected that with one exception."
On Boogie Basham Jr. being on the list for Senior Day and whether or not that's indicative of him making a decision at the end of the season as to whether or not he wants to turn pro:
"No. Boogie's going to have a decision to make in December or January. He really avoided those decisions and those meetings until the seasons over because they are just distractions. There's certainly a chance he'll leave and if he decides he'll leave, then we'll make sure that he'll have a chance to honor him as a senior and recognize him for what he did. Last year we honored Kendall Hinton and at that point, we didn't know if Kendall was going to come back and stay and if he made a decision to leave and not come back, we wanted to make sure that Kendall had his day with his family and that he was recognized."
Redshirt senior wide receiver Kendall Hinton
On Senior Day:
"We're definitely excited. We can play our game along with Senior Day and being able to go out in a great last home game with our guys and being able to do it with this Duke rivalry."
On his years at Wake Forest:
"It has definitely been a journey. Coming in and playing quarterback and transitioning into a receiver and just all of that from the first game throughout these last five years, I definitely have appreciated all I've learned from my coaches and my experiences and giving my teammates my back. It's just hard to know that it's coming to an end and I'm just grateful for everything that I learned."
On the mood of the team following the loss to Clemson and what they need to do to get back on track this weekend:
"What we talked about after the game and coming into this week is just how you respond and it wasn't the turnout that we were looking for last week but we can't control the past and its now all about focusing on the upcoming game and finishing strong."
Redshirt senior tight end Jack Freudenthal
On the mood of the team following the loss to Clemson:
"Obviously it was a tough loss. We came in that game trying to win and looking to go 1-0 and we didn't execute on offense, defense, special teams and we took the loss. We're going to learn from it. You can't let a loss beat you twice. It's something that we talked about a lot and we got to learn from the mistakes that we did and we're now into next week and that's our focus now, going 1-0 this week."
On the early mistakes in the game and how they weren't able to respond to them in the Clemson game compared to the Louisville game:
"We had trouble running the ball, we didn't establish good first down efficiency to stay on schedule, and then we didn't help our defense a lot by not converting on third down to get first downs in order to stay on the field and keep Clemson's offense off the field. We didn't make the plays to do that, obviously. That hurt the defense a lot by putting them in a bad position with two turnovers and punt return that had them on a short field to score with and then we hurt ourselves late in the last four minutes of the first half and the first four in the second half by having them score a ton of points in those situations. We hurt ourselves and we didn't execute. That's what happened."
On Senior Day:
"It's awesome. What could be better? We have Senior Day at home with that game on the ACC Network. It's against Duke, big rivalry game and this is a culmination to trying to win a state championship for us. It'll be the eighth time in history if Wake can pull off a win that we've had a state championship in Winston-Salem. It's a good football team and we're really excited and all we have to do is focus on the game plan, do our jobs, control what we can control and if we can do that, it'll be a really fun night for us."
Head Coach Dave Clawson
Opening Statement...
"Wrapping up Clemson, it was obviously a game we didn't play well. I'll share with you what I shared with the team. A result like that is never acceptable. It's so easy to say it was Clemson and they are this and they are that, but when you go back and watch the film, the amount of times we beat ourselves and our inability to execute. It started from the get-go. We allowed that first punt return that gave them a short field. We threw a pick that gave them a short field. We settled in there. We got the recovery of the punt that they fumbled, but we have to score seven and not three. We have the ball right before the half and we throw a perfect slant to a wide-open receiver who works a great release move, and doesn't catch it. That allows the next 14 points to happen and instead of it being a 17-3 game at halftime, it is 31-3. Even on those plays, we had a safety who didn't have his eyes in the right place. We had a safety that lost leverage. Clemson is as good of a team as we have played against in my time here. You make those mistakes against anybody, you get beat, but when you do against a team like Clemson, they are going to score touchdowns. Clemson executed well and we didn't. A lot of things we did are fixable and correctable. That's why we practice. We watch the film on Sunday and make the corrections. Whether you win a last-second, emotional game or lose a game like that on Saturday, you have to move forward.
"It becomes easy to move forward. We a very important game this Saturday night under the lights at BB&T Field. We play Duke for the 100th time in the history of the series. It is a series that started back in 1889. It is an opportunity to be undefeated in the Big 4, which is really important to us. It was one of the exciting things of the schedule this year was we had all three Big 4 teams at home. If we win this one, it will only be the eighth time in our history, and the first time since '07, that we went 3-0 against the Big 4. It is also Senior Day. This group has a chance to leave as either the most or second-most successful senior class in the history of Wake Forest football. I think these guys deserve a sendoff. We would love to have a great homefield advantage. This senior class has done a lot for our program. These are guys who came here and either suffered through or committed to Wake Forest after a 3-9 season. Now they are the first senior class in the history of the school to go to four straight bowl games. We hope we have a good crowd for a very important game. We still have a lot of our goals alive this year. Obviously, one of them is off the table after the Virginia Tech game, but a lot of them are still alive. It is a very important game for our team and we play a good football team.
"Duke is always one of the best-coached, fundamentally sound, disciplined football teams that we play. On offense, they are a talented team. Their quarterback, Harris, can beat you with his arm or his legs. He is their second-leading rusher and a tremendous athlete. He is certainly capable of playing at a very high level. At running back, they have two guys, Jackson and Durant, that have combined for over 900 yards. At tight end and receiver, they are big. If you look at the depth chart, there are guys 6-4, 6-4 and 6-2 and present some matchup issues. The O-line is a mix of experienced guys and young talent.
"Duke, overall, is a very experienced football team. If you look at the two-deep, they have 26 juniors and seniors. On defense, they start nine juniors and seniors. It is four seniors, five juniors and two sophomores, who are both redshirts. This is a very experienced unit. They're sixth in the ACC in total defense. Last week's score was very misleading. That was a tight, one-score game and then Duke threw a pick-six and had two other turnovers that gave Syracuse a short field. So that went from a competitive, one-score, 14-6 game to 35-6 because of the turnovers. Hopefully those are things we can generate, but you can never count on.
"This is three years in a row of the exact same matchup. It is a seven-win team vs. a six-loss team. You have a team that has a chance for a really good season and a special year against a team that is fighting for its life. If they don't win it, they aren't going to a bowl. I said this to our football team, I don't think the last two years that the better team won this game. I think in '17 we were the better team, but Duke came here 5-6 and had to win to get to a bowl, and we turned it over twice, they hit a double-move and had a long punt return and they found a way to beat us on our home field. Last year, we kind of flipped the script a little bit. We were 5-6 and had to win to go to a bowl and they were pretty banged up at the time and we won a game we had to in order to continue our season. It is almost the exact same script as the last two years, the only difference being it is the second-to-last game rather than the last game. We expect a tough, hard-fought game. We need to get better. We have to do a better job coaching, a better job playing and a better job executing. If we don't do those things, it won't be a good night for us on Saturday. Duke is certainly a very capable football team. All you have to do is watch their Virginia Tech game. They have lost two heartbreakers to Pitt and Carolina, or otherwise this could be a seven-win team that we are facing."
On the team's goals for the remaining three games of the season:
"I think the challenge at this part of the year is always that the season is long. We've been going at this for three and a half months. You always have these younger players that we're counting on and this is the hardest thing that we've ever done. They are holding onto that rope for dear life and I'm sure part of them is saying, 'Geez, how many more games do we have to do this?' What we do here at Wake Forest isn't easy. We get up early in the morning, we have meetings that start early, then the kids go to class all day and then they go to study hall. It's not easy. It's what they signed up for but saying you're going to do it and then living it for the first time isn't easy. And then you have your older guys and that this could be the last three football games of their life and they are very, very aware of what's on the line: winning the Big Four championship, getting to double-digit wins, going to a top bowl destination. They're very aware of what's in the moment and the key to the end of these seasons is do the older guys and the leadership on your football team get the younger guys to play for them. You'll never know when you'll be in this position again. It's hard to be in this position but I don't know when we're going to have a chance to play three of the Big Four teams in a season and win the first two. It's not easy to accomplish and our theme for the season is, 'sense of urgency' and I think as the season winds down, there are certain goals you've accomplished and those that are now out of reach but a lot of other things to play for and those that are, whenever teams can create that sense of urgency and purpose, you're successful. The 2018 Wake Forest Football team created that sense of urgency when we were 4-5 and whether the 2019 football team at 7-3 can create that sense of urgency, we'll see. There's only so much as a coach that you can preach. Either there's an internal buy-in and that's self-motivation or that they succumb to human nature and it's tiring, we can't win the ACC anymore; we just got blown out by Clemson. It doesn't matter. Good football teams and good football players show up and have consistency to them and that's certainly our challenge this week."
On the seniors and what they accomplished to set and even raise the standards for the football program:
"They came to Wake Forest when there were very low expectations for our program. We didn't have facilities, we had just come off of six or seven consecutive losing seasons and this group, when they got here, was a little bit of a divided locker room. There were some older guys that quite frankly didn't love football. Now we had some older guys that loved football like Brandon Chubb, Marquel Lee, Jordan Garside, and Ryan Janvion. We had some really great kids and good football players in some of those classes but there was a lot of those early groups that didn't love football, they didn't like practice, they didn't like meetings, they didn't like to watch extra film and so when this group got here, a lot of those players had to make that decision, 'Do I hang with this group that loves football or do I go with these guys that have other priorities and not help our football team?' This senior group that's walking on Saturday made the decision that football was going to be important to them. Justin Strnad, Cade Carney, all of those O-linemen. It's a great senior group and nine of them a year ago could have graduated and transferred and played somewhere else and they'd be starting anywhere else in the country and they felt so invested in our program that they came back and that's why we are in this position. I love that group, I'm thankful for them and I hope they get a proper sendoff. To not have a great crowd on Saturday for what this game means, we need our fan base to show up. We really do. We've got to have that stadium; especially our home stands packed and send these guys out the right way. Quite frankly, doing that generates future success. When you have a good crowd and a recruit sees it, it helps get the next recruit and when you don't have it, it hurts so we want to be in this position every year when it's an ongoing process and our fan base is very much a part of it. We're very aware from the part in '18, we didn't play well at home and I think this year we've corrected that with one exception."
On Boogie Basham Jr. being on the list for Senior Day and whether or not that's indicative of him making a decision at the end of the season as to whether or not he wants to turn pro:
"No. Boogie's going to have a decision to make in December or January. He really avoided those decisions and those meetings until the seasons over because they are just distractions. There's certainly a chance he'll leave and if he decides he'll leave, then we'll make sure that he'll have a chance to honor him as a senior and recognize him for what he did. Last year we honored Kendall Hinton and at that point, we didn't know if Kendall was going to come back and stay and if he made a decision to leave and not come back, we wanted to make sure that Kendall had his day with his family and that he was recognized."
Redshirt senior wide receiver Kendall Hinton
On Senior Day:
"We're definitely excited. We can play our game along with Senior Day and being able to go out in a great last home game with our guys and being able to do it with this Duke rivalry."
On his years at Wake Forest:
"It has definitely been a journey. Coming in and playing quarterback and transitioning into a receiver and just all of that from the first game throughout these last five years, I definitely have appreciated all I've learned from my coaches and my experiences and giving my teammates my back. It's just hard to know that it's coming to an end and I'm just grateful for everything that I learned."
On the mood of the team following the loss to Clemson and what they need to do to get back on track this weekend:
"What we talked about after the game and coming into this week is just how you respond and it wasn't the turnout that we were looking for last week but we can't control the past and its now all about focusing on the upcoming game and finishing strong."
Redshirt senior tight end Jack Freudenthal
On the mood of the team following the loss to Clemson:
"Obviously it was a tough loss. We came in that game trying to win and looking to go 1-0 and we didn't execute on offense, defense, special teams and we took the loss. We're going to learn from it. You can't let a loss beat you twice. It's something that we talked about a lot and we got to learn from the mistakes that we did and we're now into next week and that's our focus now, going 1-0 this week."
On the early mistakes in the game and how they weren't able to respond to them in the Clemson game compared to the Louisville game:
"We had trouble running the ball, we didn't establish good first down efficiency to stay on schedule, and then we didn't help our defense a lot by not converting on third down to get first downs in order to stay on the field and keep Clemson's offense off the field. We didn't make the plays to do that, obviously. That hurt the defense a lot by putting them in a bad position with two turnovers and punt return that had them on a short field to score with and then we hurt ourselves late in the last four minutes of the first half and the first four in the second half by having them score a ton of points in those situations. We hurt ourselves and we didn't execute. That's what happened."
On Senior Day:
"It's awesome. What could be better? We have Senior Day at home with that game on the ACC Network. It's against Duke, big rivalry game and this is a culmination to trying to win a state championship for us. It'll be the eighth time in history if Wake can pull off a win that we've had a state championship in Winston-Salem. It's a good football team and we're really excited and all we have to do is focus on the game plan, do our jobs, control what we can control and if we can do that, it'll be a really fun night for us."
Players Mentioned
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