Wake Forest football face uphill battle to make fifth straight bowl game

After an impressive four-year bowl streak, Wake Forest football will be challenged to make it a fifth year in a row.

Wake Forest has always been one of the ACC’s tougher jobs and being stuck in a division with two powerhouse teams in Clemson and Florida State makes winning that much harder.

The Demon Deacons have an impressive streak of going to a bowl game in four straight seasons, which is the longest in program history, but head coach Dave Clawson is going to be up against it this year in trying to get his program back to the postseason. His star on offense the past couple of seasons in quarterback Jamie Newman decided that he would take his talents to Athens and try to be Georgia’s starting quarterback this fall. Critics like to point out that Newman struggled in games against bigger opponents like Clemson, but he was a very talented player that will be hard for a program like Wake Forest to replace.

Clawson has always been known to be a program builder at every stop that he has been which has included FCS programs Towson and Richmond and then taking an FBS job with Bowling Green. However, as ESPN’s Bill Connelly points out, Clawson has never stayed with a program for more than four years, so this might be his biggest challenge yet.

Replacing Newman won’t be an easy task and the offense is lacking big time playmakers outside of wide receiver Sage Surratt, but he decided to opt out of the 2020 season.

The defense returns a good bit of experience, but that unit has slipped ever since former coordinator Mike Elko left for Notre Dame and then Texas A&M.

There is a lot of uncertainty in the Atlantic division after Clemson and the race to see who can come in second will be an intriguing storyline to follow as the ACC gets ready for a 10-game conference-only schedule that also has a plus one.