Barring a loss, that was about as bad of a season opener as I could have imagined for Wake Forest. The Deacs managed a measly 10 points and were a missed PAT away from OT and a missed FG away from outright losing to a Kennesaw State team that won just 2 games last season. I try not to overreact too much to the first game, but I think my season prediction would be a lot closer to 3 wins than it would be a bowl game after that performance.
The game started out great—the Deacs took the opening kickoff
right down the field on a 14 play, 75-yard drive to take a 7-0 lead on a 5-yard Robby Ashford TD run.
It was all downhill from there. The Owls answered back immediately with a 10 play, 75-yard drive to make the score 7-6 after a botched PAT. With Demond Claiborne out of the game with injured ribs, the Deacs managed just 90 yards over their remaining 6 drives of the half, resulting in 0 points and 1 blocked field goal.
Things really didn’t improve in the second half. Kennesaw State took their first possession 64 yards down the field and kicked a field goal to take a 9-7 lead with 9:45 remaining in the 3rd. They would hold that lead until around the 3:00 mark of the quarter, when Connor Calvert booted a 22 yarder to retake the lead 10-7. That was all of the scoring that occurred in the game. If the Deacs had dominated the 2nd half and blown the Owls out, the bad first half could be chalked up to being over amped for the first game of the season or rust. But to score just 3 points in the entire remainder of the game after the 1st possession? That is probably a sign that something isn’t working.
Putting up 10 points in a game against a C-USA opponent that won 2 games last season is simply a very bad sign for the remainder of the season. QB Robby Ashford had a solid game on paper, completing 20 of his 28 passes for 218 yards, but a lot of those passes were at or behind the line of scrimmage and didn’t amount to much. The Deacs never really took any shots, and it felt like they were scared to push the ball down the field. The running game without Claiborne also really failed to get anything going for the Deacs—Wake ran the ball 44 times for just 139 yards as a team, and if you take out Claiborne’s 3 rushes for 19 yards, the rest of the Deacs averaged just 2.92 yards per carry. If the offense was that inept against Kennesaw State, I wince at the thought of what it will be against teams in the ACC.
Again, I don’t want to overreact too much to the first game of the season with an entirely new coaching staff, but it’s hard not to after the performance we saw on the field. The defense was a lone bright spot, holding Kennesaw State to 9 points and 307 total yards, but it’s really to know if that was due to good defense or just a lack of offensive talent on the other side of the ball. We probably won’t figure that out next week against Western Carolina, so we’ll have to wait until week 3 when NC State comes to Winston Salem to determine what we have on that side of the ball. That being said, if Wake plays that poorly on offense again, it really won’t matter how good the defense is, because they are not going to win any ACC games if they can’t score more than 10 points.
There’s definitely a lot to improve on, but a win is still a win.
Go Deacs!
