College football coaches are, by and large, a paranoid bunch.
To protect their game preparation, teams can go to extreme lengths. They have tight restrictions on who can watch practices, barring even the media who cover the team. Programs’ facilities are often walled fortresses. Sometimes, like at Alabama during the middle of Nick Saban’s dynastic run there, programs and coaches can even mandate when residents of nearby apartment buildings are allowed to go on their balconies.
In a line of work where games are won and lost on the margins — and with those wins and losses deciding whether they keep their lucrative jobs in a sport where patience is in increasingly short supply — that omnipresent anxiety becomes a little more understandable.
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Just ask Wake Forest.
Ten years ago, the Demon Deacons found themselves at the center of one of the more bizarre scandals in modern college football history. That season, the program discovered one of its radio broadcasters had passed along sheets of Wake Forest plays to a handful of opposing teams, including ACC foes Louisville and Virginia Tech.
The saga quickly became known as “WakeyLeaks,” a play on “WikiLeaks,” a media organization that publishes leaked documents.
On Saturday, Sept. 26, the Demon Deacons will travel to No. 19 Louisville, where the leaked plays were initially stumbled upon 10 years ago, forever linking the two programs.
As the teams prepare for their Week 4 matchup, here’s a look back at WakeyLeaks:
WakeyLeaks, explained
The 2016 season remains one of the most memorable in Louisville football history. The Cardinals won nine of their first 10 games, rose as high as No. 5 in the College Football Playoff selection committee rankings and, most notably, produced their only Heisman Trophy winner in quarterback Lamar Jackson, whose on-field brilliance was one of the defining plotlines nationally in the sport that season.
One of their stiffer challenges that season, however, came from an unexpected source.
At 8-1 and No. 6 in the US LBM Coaches Poll, Louisville hosted a Wake Forest program that was coming off back-to-back 3-9 seasons and hadn’t had a winning season since 2008. What looked like a potential mismatch was anything but for the opening 45 minutes, with the Demon Deacons leading 12-10 early in the fourth quarter before the Cardinals rallied for a deceptively lopsided 44-12 victory. In the win, Jackson completed 14 of 26 passes for a season-low 145 yards.
Days later, the game’s result became overshadowed by a different storyline.
During the team’s walk-through the day before the game, one of Wake Forest’s equipment managers found a black binder sitting on top of a trash can inside Louisville’s stadium. Though it didn’t initially sound alarm bells, it soon did. Hours before kickoff, Demon Deacons coaches opened the binder to find some of their plays diagrammed, including a trick play they planned on deploying that offensive coordinator Warren Ruggiero had never run before in his more than 20 years as a coach.
The Demon Deacons had to overhaul their signs and who signaled them in, but to make sure the Cardinals were actually working off of what they could have found in the binder, Wake Forest coach Dave Clawson called one of the plays inside of it about three minutes into the contest. A double-pass play built around tight end Cam Serigne was immediately picked up, with defenders’ eyes locked on him once he slipped out of a block at the beginning of the play.
“Louisville is an excellent football team, and it was a game we felt, in order to score points we had to have some wrinkles,” Clawson said. “And all those wrinkles were right in front of us. And at that point, we knew we had been compromised. And as a result, a lot of those things we had prepared, we couldn’t run because we knew they had it.”
In wake of the findings, the Demon Deacons alerted Louisville and the ACC they were investigating a potential internal breach of confidentiality. Louisville coach Bobby Petrino denied any knowledge of the plays being in the Cardinals’ possession.
About a month later, a Wake Forest investigation that delved into emails, texts and phone records uncovered an unlikely culprit at the center of the ordeal.
The Demon Deacons concluded team radio broadcaster Tommy Elrod, a former player and assistant coach at the school, provided or attempted to provide confidential game preparations to opponents several times, going back to the 2014 season.
Elrod had played for Wake Forest from 1993-97 and was on the program’s coaching staff for 11 seasons. When Clawson was hired after the 2013 season, Elrod was not retained and joined the IMG Radio Network as an analyst shortly thereafter in 2014. As a former player and longtime assistant coach at the school, Elrod had been given full access to Demon Deacons players, team functions, film room and practices.
Many people interviewed for a 2022 story in The Athletic on the scandal said Elrod was motivated primarily by revenge after Clawson didn’t keep him on staff.
Due to his role in the scheme, Elrod was fired by IMG and banned from Wake Forest athletics and its facilities.
"It's incomprehensible that a former Wake Forest student-athlete, graduate-assistant, full-time football coach and current radio analyst for the school would betray his alma mater," Clawson said in a statement.
The probe turned up three opponents mired in the scandal: Virginia Tech (for an infamous 2014 game that was scoreless at the end of regulation, spawning an iconic meme of then-Hokies coach Frank Beamer), Louisville (in 2016) and Army (in 2014 and 2016).
Elrod sent leaked plays to then-Army defensive coordinator Jay Bateman and defensive line coach Ray McCartney, the latter of whom coached with Elrod at Wake Forest. Phone records showed a call between Elrod and then-Virginia Tech assistant coach Shane Beamer the night before the Hokies and Demon Deacons played in 2014.
At Louisville, Elrod had a connection on staff in co-offensive coordinator/wide receivers coach Lonnie Galloway, with whom he had coached for two seasons at Wake Forest.
"Lonnie received a call from Elrod during the week of the Wake Forest game, and some information was shared with him that week," Louisville athletic director Tom Jurich said in a statement in Dec. 2016. "Among the communication were a few plays that were sent and then shared with our defensive staff. None of the special plays were run during the course of the game. Our defense regularly prepares for similar formations every week in their normal game plan. Any other information that may have been discussed was nothing that our staff had not already seen while studying Wake Forest in their preparations for the game and the material was not given any further attention.”
What came from WakeyLeaks?
Louisville and Virginia Tech were fined $25,000 apiece by the ACC for accepting the leaked information. At the time, it was the maximum fine allowed by the conference’s bylaws.
"I am deeply disturbed something like this would occur, and regardless of the degree of involvement, the protection of the competitive integrity of our games is fundamental to any athletic contest," ACC commissioner John Swofford said in a statement. "Sportsmanship and ethical values are at the core of competitive integrity and in these instances, those were missing. The expectation, regardless of the sport, is that any athletics department staff members would immediately communicate with their supervisor if they are approached by someone from another institution with proprietary information."
Galloway was suspended for Louisville’s appearance that season in the Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl against LSU, which the Cardinals ended up losing to finish the season on a three-game losing streak. Beamer and Bateman were both fined.
Hard feelings between Wake Forest and Louisville lingered. In a Jan. 2017 story in Sports Illustrated, an anonymous ACC coach said Jackson had “no shot at playing quarterback in the NFL,” which Jackson later said he heard came from Wake Forest (Clawson denied it, but regardless of who the source was, talk about an all-time misfire of a prediction). In each of the next two seasons, and with the opposition no longer in possession of some of their plays, the Demon Deacons’ offense toyed with the Cardinals, scoring a combined 98 points in wins in 2017 and 2018.
The WakeyLeaks experience changed Clawson’s approach to coaching. A man who had typically been open to help bring attention to a sometimes overlooked program at the smallest power-conference school started to close Wake Forest off a bit more than he previously had.
“It will forever impact how I run a program,” Clawson said to ESPN in 2017. “I hate it. I like being open. But we can’t do that anymore.”
For some, it remains one of the bigger scandals in college football history, one that’s not widely viewed as such only because of the stature of the program that was impacted by it.
“It was really (messed) up and it went on for so long,” a Wake Forest assistant said to The Athletic in 2022. “If this involved Clemson or someplace like that, this would’ve been the biggest deal of all time — all of college football would’ve been paused to figure out what was going on.”
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Wake Forest-Louisville revives memories of 'WakeyLeaks' and a shocking betrayal
