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ATLANTIC COAST CONFERENCE FOOTBALL KICKOFFJuly 19, 2018Dave ClawsonWillie YarbaryPhil HaynesCharlotte, North Carolina Q. Phil, it's been a pretty long journey for you and a lot of the other offensive linemen you came in with. Can you tell us what you're feeling going into the final year with those guys, with Justin and Ryan and Pat? PHIL HAYNES: First of all, thank you for the question, and thank you, Coach Clawson, for letting me come. Those four guys you named and also all the other O-linemen, we've worked really hard together, and this final year, we're trying to make the most of it, getting extra work in but also enjoying time off the field together because college football is unique. It's like a brotherhood, so we're trying to maximize that to the fullest. Q. Last year there was a 49 percent reduction in sacks compared to 2016; what is it about the unit that has allowed you guys to gel and really protect that backfield? PHIL HAYNES: Pretty much like the last question, just gelling together on and off the field. We do a lot of film study together every week, and we're just always studying film together, just off the field always having fun together, going to play golf or something like that. That's how we gel. Q. So you're a golfer? PHIL HAYNES: Not me. I normally just watch. But Ryan Anderson is a really good golfer, so is Pat Osterhage. Q. Last season Wake Forest had one of the two most explosive offenses in the entire Atlantic Coast Conference in a league with a lot of explosive offenses. What's your take on that? Where does the explosiveness come from, and what's the role of the line in getting those big chunk plays? PHIL HAYNES: Well, I think we have a good group of guys that just come to practice every day and work hard. I think we can compete with anybody in the country. The O-line is a big part of that. I play O-line so I'm a little biased. But I feel like O-line is very important because if you can't protect the quarterback or open up holes for running backs, no one is going anywhere. Q. What are your impressions of Jamie Newman and Sam Hartman when you think about leadership and their ability to contribute in 2018? PHIL HAYNES: They're both great guys. They both are getting extra work every day. I feel like they've brought on the young receivers and all the old receivers, as well, to be the best they can be. Q. What you can say about what Coach Clawson has done for this team and just what you can say about the environment around Wake Forest, how this has evolved over time in your opinion? PHIL HAYNES: It's unbelievable honestly. For me personally, and I know other people on the team too, he made me into a better man today. Also like in the weight room, in the locker room, the culture has changed. There's more emphasis on respecting other people's stuff. Just normally when I was a freshman, you couldn't leave anything out in the locker room, my phone, my wallet, anything. I love that Coach Clawson is just bringing everybody together as a family. Q. Obviously the tight end position has been very important within the Wake Forest offense over the last four years with Cam Serigne being gone. What is it about that part of the line, that part of the offense that you think is going to be important, either trying to fill that gap or just put new people in its place? PHIL HAYNES: We have a lot of tight ends who are really, really good, and I know that our coaches do a great job of preparing everybody to be able to play, and I know that whoever steps in that job is going to do a great job. Q. Tell us a little bit about your teammate over there who's getting ready to come up? PHIL HAYNES: Him? Well, I go against him every day in practice. He's a defensive tackle, I'm an offensive guard, so every day one-on-ones against him. He'll probably tell you he's better than me, but we'll take that up this fall. Q. Willie, tell me about him. WILLIE YARBARY: Phil, he's a pretty good competitor. He comes to work every day. I think I got the better of him for the most part. He's a good teammate. He motivates young guys, and he's just a good part of the team. Q. Willie, you and Zeke are back on the line, but you lose Duke and Wendell. How is that going to affect you this year? WILLIE YARBARY: I don't think it's really going to affect us much. They were great players and great teammates, but I feel like we have two ends taking their spot right now, and then we have depth and other guys in the room, so I really don't think it should affect us that much. Now the inside guys got to start pressuring the ball more and pressuring the quarterback more. Q. You were named team captain for 2018. What does that mean for you? WILLIE YARBARY: It means a lot. It means a lot that my teammates, they see me as a captain. They depend on me. So now I've got to start stepping up and filling that leadership role because last year we had a great leader, especially in the D-line room, in Wendell Dunn. Cam Serigne was another great leader on the offensive side of the ball. So it just means that I have to put more time in. I have to start spending more time with the young guys and just trying to make this thing gel more. Q. How would you describe yourself as a leader? WILLIE YARBARY: I'm not as vocal as I should be, but I think when I get around the guys, they understand that I mean business, or if I have to get vocal, then there's a problem. Q. You obviously have been here long enough when Wake Forest wasn't going to bowl games and hadn't been for a couple of years. Now that it's been back-to-back years, shooting for three, when did you know that this program was being built the right way? WILLIE YARBARY: I feel like it was being built after I got to college. It takes time, and we always talk about the process, and so after long years and seeing that we didn't want to be 3-9 again, I think we just started putting more time into it. I have to dedicate a lot of that to Coach Hourigan, our strength and conditioning coach, spending hours with us trying to get us stronger and just preparing us for this conference, the ACC. Because the ACC, especially the Atlantic, is one of the hardest conferences in the world. Q. What can you say about Zeke Rodney and what he's meant to you and kind of how you played off each other? What has he taught you and what have you taught back to him as you look for that leadership on the interior line this year? WILLIE YARBARY: Zeke, that's my roommate so that's one of my best friends on the team. He's a dog. He's a competitor, so that's what I like about him. We compete about sets every year. I won last year, just to let him know. But he works hard, and like he wants the best out of me, and so I like how we compete all the time. I can't even just say with Zeke because we have other defensive tackles, Elontae Bateman, who also is on our heels causing us to compete all the time, Su Kamara. So we really have good defensive tackles that keep me on my heels and keep each other accountable. Q. You won a lot of games last year, but they were high-scoring games both ways. What do you have to do defensively to maybe cut down some on the yards and points you're giving up? WILLIE YARBARY: I've got to give credit to the offense. They did their thing last year. On defense, it's a whole unit. It's not just one specific group. Not the safeties, not the linebackers, not the D-line. We all have to get better. If we want to cut down on passing yards, we need to get to the ball faster. If we want to stop the run, we've got to get to the ball faster and got to get off blocks. It's really everybody, it's not just one specific group that can change one thing. Q. You missed spring ball; how have you approached the fall season mentally knowing that you've sort of been on the sideline metaphorically for a little bit? WILLIE YARBARY: I'm cherishing every day, like everything can be taken away from you. Me getting back to the summer and being around the guys, it really gave me butterflies, honestly, because I've been in this thing just workouts while everybody is practicing, and I'm so anxious to see what everybody is doing. But it just humbled me. It caused me to want to stay injury free this year, and I'm just trying to take it day by day because it can be taken at any time. Q. I wanted to ask you about Greg Dortch and your thoughts about him this season and his progress. DAVE CLAWSON: Yeah, excited to get him back. He was off to a great start last year, and that was an unfortunate injury. I've never seen that happen before, that a guy gets injured on the pylon. But he looks good. He's healthy, and obviously he's a big part of our offense, so we need Greg to be Greg Dortch. We need him to be elusive, and certainly he can be a huge role on special teams for us. But a lot of what we do on offense goes through the slot position, and we feel we have a pretty good one there. Q. Kendall Hinton was a big factor in your come-from-behind win over Duke two years ago. Because of injuries and other things, we haven't really seen that Kendall since. What do you see in him coming into the season? DAVE CLAWSON: Well, Kendall is a very dynamic, elusive athlete. Last year John Wolford really won the competition, and I think everybody could see why. Obviously Kendall put himself a little bit behind the 8-ball being suspended for the first three games, and we're just going to have to work our way through that. That's why you recruit, and that's why you build depth, and certainly Jamie and Sam are going to have an opportunity to win the position in camp, and that is just going to be very fluid. But Kendall is a gifted football player. What his role is going to be, it's hard to say, because until week 4 -- what we think we are now and what we become by week 4 can be two different things. Again, we've just got to be fluid with it, and we'll see where it evolves. Q. A year ago you talked a little bit about playing Sage Surratt as a true freshman. Speaks to how much depth you had at receiver that you didn't need him. Talk about his prospects and what you expect out of him this year? DAVE CLAWSON: Yeah, we're excited about Sage. I think the fact that we were able to redshirt him last year I think speaks volumes about the type of depth that we've been able to develop at Wake Forest. We've got 16 starters back from an 8-5 team that won a bowl game, and we were able to preserve a year of Sage's eligibility. But he's a guy that I think is capable of a breakout season. He's one of the best athletes on the team. His hand-eye coordination is exceptional. He's competitive. He's smart. And we're very excited to see what he can do this year. Q. You talked in the spring about Kendall trying to become a leader, and he needs to be out there to develop that. What was your reaction when you learned he was going to be suspended three games? DAVE CLAWSON: I mean, disappointed, but you use those as opportunities for growth, and it is what it is. I mean, you can't have rules for convenience. We have rules and policies, and the team knows what they are, and whether you're the starting quarterback or the eighth-string kicker, there's got to be consistency in the application of it. Again, we just need him to bounce back. We need him to do things right. I have great confidence he will, and I'm sure at some point Kendall will have a very positive effect on our football team this year. Q. Just to speak on playing the long game and starting to see that success come to fruition at Wake Forest. DAVE CLAWSON: Yeah, I mean, it's been very rewarding. Getting up here year one and year two when we were 3-9, it's a lot more enjoyable being up here after consecutive winning seasons and consecutive bowl wins. And the thing that I'm most excited about is I really believe that we've built a foundation that we can sustain success. I think if you look at the history of Wake Forest football, there's been flashes of success, but I think that we've built something that we can sustain, created a regional and a national narrative that Wake Forest is a place that people aren't surprised when we go to bowl games. I think right now internally the expectation is we want to be a perennial bowl team. We want to compete for championships, and we want the regional and the national media to view our program that way. And having said that, progress in this league is not easy. I mean, this division and this conference is really good football, and I think the big thing last year, not only did we get back to a bowl and win eight games, but we beat some really good football teams. I don't feel like our season in any way was a fluke. We had one of the most difficult schedules in the country last year, and we want to build off it, though. I don't think anybody on our staff, in our locker room is satisfied with what we did, and we think there's a greater ceiling to what we can accomplish, and we're excited to prove that. Q. I'm really struck by the contrast between your very first season where you couldn't protect the passer and couldn't really run block, either, and then last year where against even the best defenses in the league, you're moving it up and down the field. Obviously it's a process, it took five years, but what were some of the critical elements that opened up your offense and made it so difficult to defend? DAVE CLAWSON: Well, again, we took a long-term approach to it. I knew Phil Haynes was going to be a really good football player. I knew Ryan Anderson was going to be a good player, Justin Strnad, Patrick Osterhage. We did not have an O-line when we got there. We had to play those guys before we were ready. Whether it was John Wolford or any of those guys. And we just tried to stay positive with them, and we thought at some point the accumulation of all those reps and all that experience that there would be a payoff. And I think what happens is you kind of have incremental improvement, but when individually they all get better together, then you have that explosion. And I think that happened across the board, whether it was our O-line, which really gelled to become in my opinion one of the best O-lines in the conference if not the country. John Wolford was a second team all ACC quarterback, Gregg Dortch, Scotty Washington, Matt Colburn, Cade Carney. I mean, we have good players, and the players we get we make them better, and that's how we run the program. And that will never change. I don't think any amount of success we have -- I don't think the dynamics of how we do it are going to change. You know, we're going to be a blue-collar program and we're going to get good players, and we're going to develop them and we're going to keep them in school and graduate players. And to me that's the advantage of Wake Forest. It's not the disadvantage. Q. Last season Mike Weaver was quite the asset for your kicking game. With him gone, how may you replace him, and where does freshman Nick Sciba kind of fit in that mix? DAVE CLAWSON: Well, who our kicker is going to be, I don't know. I can tell you who our left guard is going to be, I can tell you our defensive tackle. Dom Maggio will be our punter, and we've brought in two graduate transfers. We brought a freshman Nick Sciba. We have a number of kickers, and that is going to be a competition. Mike Weaver had a great career for us. He spoiled us. He was very accurate, very consistent, and the other thing that Mike did a great job of is the operation with him was so quick that he got the ball up in a hurry. Of the concerns we have and of the question marks, that certainly is one of the biggest ones going into camp here. That's a non-answer to a question, right? I don't know who our kicker is. Q. How does the new redshirt rule affect the way you will approach -- DAVE CLAWSON: Oh, I think for Wake Forest, it's great. When that rule passed, I think that rule helps Wake Forest as much as any program in the country because we probably redshirt -- you know, the way that we run the program is we've probably redshirted a half to three-quarters of our freshmen every year, and the nature of the school, being private, very academic, it's hard to get guys in. We don't get a lot of walk-ons. So if we redshirt, let's say, 15 players or 18 players, and now all of a sudden all those guys get four games that they haven't got before, to me that's 60 to 80 more player games that we get. And I just think it helps keep the freshmen engaged. We have a plan and a strategy of how we're going to deal with it and how we're going to work it, and we've thought a lot about it and researched it and talked to people and we've talked as a staff. And I'm not going to share what that philosophy is, but we're -- I think this will really help us. Again, this is probably the most depth that we've had in my five years at Wake. And then on top of that you have this new redshirt rule that those 15 to 20 guys that we typically would redshirt that you now have available for four games, I think it'll help us on special teams. It'll help us in our different personnel packages, and I'm excited about it. I think it's really going to help us. Q. It's not unheard of but it is a bit atypical the Demon Deacons have struck gold with their schedule this year, five games at home, two against high-profile programs as in Notre Dame and Clemson. You get on a plane to Tulane in August and you really don't get on a plane again until the end of October. That's something special I would think? DAVE CLAWSON: Yeah, I don't know. Flipped a coin, it's random. Sometimes you get answers on that that it's just the way it worked out. We start on the road -- Tulane is a good football team. Willie Fritz is a great football coach. He's a guy that's won everywhere he's been. It's year three. They're really improved. We're not looking past Tulane. And then we are at home for a while, which I think in some ways will be nice. I think in some ways it will be in that same routine for a while. But we play a lot of good football teams, and our approach has always been it's a one-week season. Just the way those weeks go this year is a little unusual. The home games and those things, that doesn't bother me. To me what's most challenging is the two games that we have to play on four days' rest. That's probably the part that we're less thrilled about. Just give our kids -- at least give them a week break, or if you play a Thursday game it's nice to have the previous week off. But that's the TV contract and that's the scheduling model, so we'll roll with it. We're certainly not at a competitive disadvantage with it; the teams that we play have the same break. Q. Several teams in the league have dual-threat quarterbacks now. What makes offenses with running quarterbacks so much more difficult to defend? DAVE CLAWSON: Well, it just creates more of a dilemma for the defense in terms of defending the run, and even if you get the extra hat in the box, you can still be a guy short with a running quarterback. It's a numbers game. If the quarterback can run and the running back can be used as a lead blocker, you're plus one. There's always a balance. There's a lot of good things on the chalkboard when you run the quarterback, but you also don't want to overdo it that you get your quarterback hurt. The quarterback is obviously a very critical position and there's limited reps in practice. Last year I always thought we were right on the edge with John. Obviously there were critical calls that we felt if we had to run the quarterback we would. The quarterback gets hit in the normal course of a play anyway, whether it's a drop-back pass or he escapes or a scramble. So I think you have to factor in the durability aspect of your quarterback when you decide how much you want to run him. It's something that we do. It's not something that we want to major in. But there's certainly a lot of plays last year and ways that we got defended that the quarterback run game was very advantageous to us. Q. Nearly 20 years ago you took your head coaching position at Fordham, the youngest head Division I coach at the time. This has been quite a journey over the last 20 years. As a head coach, what do you think you've learned about yourself? DAVE CLAWSON: Oh, I learn something new every year. I really do. And I think that's the fun thing about the job. We never get set in stone and do things the same way. This game evolves, and I think if you don't evolve as a head coach -- I'm a much different head coach now than I was 19 years ago in 1999. I probably don't drive as fast, but I probably stay in the lane a little better than I did back then. But still, it's really rewarding. It's a lot of fun. To me at Wake Forest, when you get to coach guys the caliber of Phil and Willie, it makes it even more rewarding. That was tough for me. What two guys do you pick to come down and represent your program at Media Day when you have so many great choices? I just think both Phil and Willie represent the very best of our program, that these guys were a little bit of under-the-radar guys in recruiting. They were redshirted, and just through work ethic and character and all that, have made themselves two of the very best in the ACC. And this is what makes working at Wake Forest so rewarding is you get to coach young men like this. These are two guys that if they decided they wanted to get into coaching, I'd hire them in a heartbeat. Every day this whole journey, I feel very fortunate and lucky that I can be the head coach at a place like Wake Forest. FastScripts Transcript by ASAP Sports   |
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