It’s taken Jake Dickert no time at all to establish a good program at Wake Forest despite some significant limitations, and with year two serving as an impressive proof of concept, maybe it’s actually the Deacs who are best positioned to sit at the top of the ACC’s second tier on a regular basis. They aren’t going to spend big, but clearly they’ve got it where it counts.
Wake won nine games last season mostly on the strength of its defense and may well win nine games again this year, but in this case
it’ll be on the strength of its offense. Gio Lopez has been a godsend for the Deacs—and vice versa—after this team struggled so badly to throw the ball efficiently in 2025. Lopez needed the change of scenery, or rather, an escape from the sclerotic indifference atrophying everything and everyone in Chapel Hill.
After spending a year at UNC destroying his value, Lopez is on pace for career season at Wake, and already has as many touchdown passes as he threw all of last season. Amazing what decent coaching can do.
Lopez’s revitalization is leading a surprisingly robust Wake Forest offense:
The only team to hold Wake under 6.0 yards per play is Miami, which is also the only team to beat Wake so far this season. The Deacs do just about everything well but you can see there is an immense difference in the efficiency and explosiveness of the passing game compared to last year.
A big reason for the increase in the passing game’s effectiveness is Carlos Hernandez, who apparently gets shot out of a cannon on each snap. Hernandez was one of the guys who came over with Dickert from Wazzu and had a solid 2025—but he has since gone to plaid. These are the unexpected gifts that you get as a coach sometimes; Hernandez has dramatically leveled up, giving Wake one of the best big-play threats in the league. He has over 600 yards receiving in five games this year, eight yards shy of his 2025 season total.
The fascinating thing about Wake’s offense is that Hernandez has 37 catches, and no other receiver has more than 12. You know where they’re going, but it hasn’t really mattered. I don’t expect NC State is the team to alter that trend.
So it’s gonna take some points for State to win this game. On the bright side, Wake’s defense is quite a bit worse than it was last season. Set aside the Stanford game—Stanford flew all the way to the east coast, farted into a can, and went home—and the underlying performance hasn’t been very good. The Deacs have been able to limit explosive plays in the passing game, putting the bend in bend-but-don’t-break.
Wake’s run defense doesn’t live on TFLs—its stuff rate is below average—but it also hasn’t had a bad day, not even against Miami. It suggests that while they don’t often win at the line of scrimmage, they do tackle well. This would go hand-in-hand with that whole bend-but-don’t-break thing.
So far the balance of explosive plays in any given game has been on Wake’s side, and that’s made a significant difference. Maybe bogging this game down a bit tomorrow would be to State’s advantage. But there’s a good chance that the arms decide it.
