Wake Forest

Wake Forest is the smallest school in the Power conferences by enrollment, and the program has spent twenty years making that fact irrelevant. The 2006 ACC championship and Orange Bowl appearance came from a 5,400-student campus. The quarterback pipeline — Riley Skinner, John Wolford, Sam Hartman — came from a recruiting class that every school the Deacons compete against would have passed on. Dave Clawson's decade of bowls and an 11-3 peak in 2021 proved the model was repeatable. Then Clawson stepped away after 2024 and Winston-Salem braced for the thing that usually follows when a small program loses the coach who made it work.

Jake Dickert, hired from Washington State, went 9-4 in year one and won the Duke's Mayo Bowl 43-29 over Mississippi State — the most wins any Wake Forest first-year coach had ever managed. The program signed Dickert to a long-term extension in December 2025. The bowl MVP was Robby Ashford, who is now out of eligibility, and the 2026 quarterback situation is unresolved. The model is intact. The personnel question is open.

The 2026 question in Winston-Salem is the one Dickert's debut made worth asking: is this the floor of an era, or was year one the high? Wake Forest has answered that question the same way every time it has been asked — by finding a quarterback nobody else wanted and turning him into a system piece that works. The 2006 answer was an ACC title. The 2025 answer was nine wins. The 2026 answer starts at quarterback.