https://theathletic.com/3403878/2022/07/12/wakeyleaks-wake-forest-dave-clawson/
Inside ‘WakeyLeaks,’ the scandal that should have rocked college football
The Athletic Staff
Jul 12, 2022
By Bruce Feldman, Matt Fortuna and Jayson Jenks
In November 2016, Ryan Anderson watched as one of
Wake Forest’s coaches diagrammed a play on the whiteboard: a wide receiver screen in the flat. But there was a twist. Instead of three receivers split out to block, there would be three offensive linemen, including Anderson, Wake’s starting right tackle.
“You’re always in the trenches,” Anderson says. “To get out there near some of the pencil necks — linemen have a bunch of funny words for DBs — that’s the lineman’s dream.”
After the meeting, Anderson and the rest of the line retreated to their position room. “We were all going over how to line up like a receiver, which foot to have back, how to stand,” Anderson says. “No one had ever played receiver.”
Four days later, Wake Forest would play on the road against Lamar Jackson and the No. 6
Louisville Cardinals. A former Wake staffer said coaches wanted to keep players engaged late in the season, so the Demon Deacons installed about eight new and trick plays, including the three-linemen look and a double-pass to the tight end.
Anderson and the linemen took their roles seriously, drilling the new wrinkle day after day. “It was such a crazy, weird, diabolic play,” he says. The play was so new, in fact, that Wake offensive coordinator Warren Ruggiero didn’t have old film to show his players how it should look; Ruggiero had never run it in more than 20 years of coaching.
Before the game, one of Wake’s equipment managers found a black binder sitting prominently atop a trash can inside Louisville’s stadium. The binder didn’t raise immediate red flags among the equipment staff; it’s not uncommon for teams to leave behind fake plays as a decoy. But just hours before kickoff, Wake’s coaches and players were stunned when they opened the binder for the first time and saw the trick play inside.
“Immediately we knew,” Anderson says. “They had stolen our plays.”
Wake Forest had an 11-win season and a No. 15 finish in the AP poll in 2021, both program-bests. But in 2014 and 2015, during arguably the apex of ACC football, coach Dave Clawson and the Deacons had one conference win apiece in Clawson’s first two seasons. Fortunes reversed during that 2016 season, when the Deacons went 7-6, capped by their first bowl win in eight seasons.
But as it turned out, the smallest Power 5 school in the country had played with one arm tied behind its back, in a scandal that came to be known as “WakeyLeaks.”
“It was really f—-d up and it went on for so long,” a Wake Forest assistant says. “If this involved
Clemson or someplace like that, this would’ve been the biggest deal of all time — all of college football would’ve been paused to figure out what was going on.”
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