Dave Clawson unloads on Wake Forest perceptions
Dave Clawson came into his Tuesday afternoon press conference ahead of the ACC championship with a couple of things to get off his chest.
Clawson’s regularly scheduled time with the media was highlighted by a roughly 3½-minute sarcastic monologue aimed at a couple of sources that were critical of Wake Forest’s fan base – or lack thereof – this season.
Some context here: The “six fans” reference is a nod to Kirk Herbstreit of ESPN saying on College GameDay under his breath that Wake Forest has that many fans. The “40 fans for bowl games” reference is something that Stewart Mandel of The Athletic wrote in a bowl projections piece.
Here was the full transcript from Clawson, with some context added of the room’s reaction as he went:
“You know, one of the issues that we really have run into in this game with tickets is, as you know, the ACC has a very close affiliation with ESPN, through the ACC Network.
“And so, when we first got our ticket allotment, the ACC only allotted us six tickets for our entire fan base.”
(there was an awkward two-second silence here)
“And they said, ‘Hey, ESPN is the Worldwide Leader, and somebody who’s a very respect journalist and does a great job and is extremely knowledgeable about college football, I guess …’
“I didn’t see it, I guess they said we only have six fans. And so our allotment was only for six tickets.”
(at this point, we were up to speed)
“Fortunately we sold those six tickets rather quickly and we asked the ACC to do a little more research that we thought, you know, for bowl games and stuff like that, traditionally we probably sold more than six tickets.
“And then they did this deep search and they read this article in The Athletic on bowl projections.
“And The Athletic as you know is an online publication and they really do a fabulous job of covering college football.”
(I kind of thought we were headed for normalcy here, but it was only halftime)
“They’ve got really good writers like Bruce Feldman and Matt Fortuna, Andy Staples and Grace Raynor. But one of their writers wrote, I guess it’s not in print because it’s online, that we only sold 40 tickets for bowl games.
“So the ACC took that information and then only gave us 34 more tickets, saying that we probably wouldn’t sell – you know, we’d sell more than six but not more than 40, because they read that.
“I was confused because I went back and watched our Military Bowl and our Belk Bowl, and I counted the people in the stands and I thought we had more than 40 people there.”
(we get to the serious stuff here, it’s coming)
“So then at that point, the ACC actually gave us the full allotment of 5,500 tickets, and we instantly sold it out. And then they gave us another 3,500 tickets, and they instantly sold it out.
“And so we’ve completely sold out two allotments of our tickets. Two-thousand students bought tickets within 45 minutes of the tickets even being open.
“We’ll have over 3,000 students there who bought tickets. We expect to have over 20,000, 25,000 Demon Deacon fans.”
(that should be incredible)
“And so again, Wake Forest as a school is different. We do have a small enrollment, we don’t have 60,000 students. But the passion of our fanbase – we may not have the numbers, but the passion, how much they care about our program, is certainly equal to a lot of other schools."
(one last dig, and then Clawson launched into how good Pitt is, which we’ll get into later)
“I really appreciate the ACC of recognizing that and increasing the allotment from six to 40 to 5,500 to 9,000.”
