Entering year ten leading the Wake Forest program, Dave Clawson has led the Demon Deacons to seven straight bowl games, won 11 games in 2021, and has seven wins or more in six of those seasons.
However, if it wasn't for a bold demand and an athletic director's faith the past decade for Wake Forest could have looked a whole lot different.
Clawson shared recently during an interview with Andy Staples, that when he was originally offered the Wake Forest job, the athletic director at the time was Ron Wellman, and the contract length was five-years, and Clawson told him - after taking a look at the roster he'd be inheriting - he wasn't interested in the job unless it was a six-year deal. In short, Clawson felt like they were going to "take some lumps" early on and "there was no way we'd be competitive before year three."
That's something that most Power Five programs would not be willing to do in today's football landscape, Clawson wasn't shy in sharing.
Clawson was right on with that prediction. The Demon Deacons did take their lumps early going 3-9 in each of first those two seasons, and they've since rattled off seven straight bowl trips.
While the advent of NIL has helped a number of programs, and thousands of players, Clawson and his staff has made an intentional decision to continue to follow their own unique model at Wake Forest focused on providing a unrivaled experience to their players while getting a valuable degree from an institution nationally regarded like Wake Forest is.
The alternative would be trying to imitate Clemson or Florida State, and Clawson and his staff knew that wasn't going to be the model to lead them to succces.
With the introduction of NIL a few years ago, the challenge for a program like Wake Forest shifted from building a program, to sustaining one in a landscape that where the scales were seemingly tilting toward to blue blood programs of college football.
Still, Clawson and his staff believed strongly in the value of what they have been selling and have stuck to retaining and developing talent while some of their new facility improvements should allow them to recruit at a higher level to help the program's upward trajectory.
"Even in this day and age of free agency, and tampering, and Name, Image and Likeness, people want to talk about what we lost, but we had 6-8 players that were offered between $150,000 and $500,000 by other schools...and all those guys chose to stay."
Those Wake Forest guys weren't in the transfer portal testing the waters, they were Demon Deacons on the roster that other programs were tampering with - to use NCAA lingo.
Of the eight Clawson mentioned, he would go on to share that seven of them shared that they were being pursued by other programs with promise of a significant pay day after the fact, so Clawson wouldn't hear it from someone else. The lone outlier in that group kept Clawson in the loop as communication was happening day-to-day.
All decided to stay, largely because of the reason they decided to enroll in the first place - the value of a Wake Forest degree, which is valued at $450,000 by the time student athletes graduate, is more valuable to them than the quick cash that leaving without a degree would be.
Hear more in the conversation between Staples and Clawson in the clip.