A schedule break unlike any other
Wake Forest gets good news in a schedule shift for the first time since … at least 2019.
Wake Forest’s moving target of a football schedule has been altered again.
And this time it’s actually good news for the Deacons.
The ACC’s latest tweak to the schedule means Wake Forest will travel to Louisville on Dec. 12 — a game that had been slated for Dec. 19. It takes the place of the Dec. 12 game against Notre Dame (I’m not typing out the name of that sponsor).
Added to the schedule is a home game against Florida State on Dec. 19 — Wake Forest wasn’t originally scheduled to play the Seminoles this season.
Roughly seven hours and change before the announced schedule shift, coach Dave Clawson said: “We’re very hopeful that we’re going to be able to start practicing again at the end of the week and be able to finish with a couple of ACC games and hopefully get to a bowl game.”
That path became easier Tuesday.
If you have to play your first game in a month, better to play it against a scuffling Louisville team mired in Scott Satterfield’s sophomore slump than against an undefeated Notre Dame team.
And trading out the game against the unbeaten team for one against a Florida State team that’s seemingly quit on its season three times — well that’s either gravy or karma paying off for drawing the league’s toughest schedule.
Notre Dame is No. 2. Florida State has 2 wins.
(This is the part where you have three options: to laugh about one of those being against North Carolina, to laugh about the other being against Jacksonville State, or to laugh about both.)
Clawson’s respect for first-year Florida State coach Mike Norvell was obvious before he was named Willie Taggart’s replacement — Clawson spoke glowingly of Norvell when he was Memphis’ coach in the Birmingham Bowl, and they were two of the three coaches on the ACC’s subcommittee to examine returning to competition during the spring and summer.
(This is the part where you only have one option: to reflect on the awkwardness that the third coach of that group was Dabo Swinney, who’s been involved in a war of the petty press conference quotes with Norvell for a couple of weeks.)
Wake Forest hasn’t played since its Nov. 14 loss at North Carolina. The Demon Deacons have played the fewest games in the ACC (seven); Florida State is one of three teams in the league that has played eight.
The top five teams in the ACC standings all appeared on Wake Forest’s initial schedule — the COVID-19 adjustments mean they won’t see Notre Dame or Miami.
If Joe Giglio of WRAL doesn’t have a clear picture of what bowl season will look like, nobody in this profession has one. So when he writes that his sources give the impression that bowl season will be like “throwing darts,” you get a picture of the free-for-all that will be football’s version of Selection Sunday.
The ACC has already lost four bowl affiliations to cancelation — Sun, Pinstripe, Holiday and Fenway. If you want to be an optimistic ACC fan and think Notre Dame and Clemson will make the College Football Playoff, that leaves six non-CFP bowls for the ACC and three alternates.
Wake Forest will enter this last stretch of games with a chance to enter the top six in the ACC standings and remove all doubt of being left out in the cold for a bowl berth.
Winning two games and being 6-3 with two one-possession losses and a loss to Clemson is an easy-to-sell résumé. By virtue of having played the fewest games, Wake Forest has the most to gain with two games left to play.
Now one of them is a lot more winnable than it was yesterday.
Well … all of that seems like good news for Wake Forest.
This is the part where I remind you that the last two teams that were going to play Florida State were given a few hours’ notice of those games being canceled.
As always: I’ll believe these games will happen when they’re actually kicked off.