2021 SUBWAY ACC FOOTBALL CHAMPIONSHIP GAME: WAKE FOREST VS PITT

December 4, 2021

Dave Clawson

Pitt 45, Wake Forest 21

DAVE CLAWSON: First off, congratulations to the Pitt Panthers and Coach Narduzzi. They played a heck of a game. They played better than us tonight. They outplayed us. They did a great job defensively. They found ways to make plays on offense in the kicking game, and we got outplayed. They certainly deserve to be the ACC champions.

I'm certainly proud of our team. We're disappointed we didn't win the game tonight. Obviously after the first quarter we really didn't execute very well on offense. We had too many turnovers. I don't think we tackled as well as we need to on defense.

But when you play a good football team, a lot of times they're responsible for that.

I really, really want to thank all of our fans, how many people we had from Deacon Nation. It was awesome, all the students that came down. I think we had over 20 buses. It was just a great scene for us and our football team, and we are so grateful for all the support that we've gotten all year from our fans and our students and faculty members and everybody.

It's really been a special season, and we're disappointed we didn't win the game. I don't think that takes away from the season we've had. We've had a great season. We're the Atlantic Division champions, and we have a chance to go get a Bowl championship.

We have one trophy and we have a chance to go get a second, and we need to rest up and heal up and kind of psychologically recover from this one. And our guys will bounce back, and we're excited to go to a great bowl, wherever that may be, and try to get win No. 11.

With that, I'll take questions.

Q. Dave, were you surprised they were able to get that much pressure on Sam?

DAVE CLAWSON: I mean, you know, they did some things and created some -- a lot of one-on-one blocks. It felt like we dropped a lot of balls that we had a chance to get the ball deep a few times. And they weren't easy catches, they were contested catches, but we knew going into the game that when they play that quarter system and press coverage, we're going to have to make contested catches, and we didn't.

If they can cover you on the perimeter, there's no reason for them to not keep heating you up, and so they just kept heating us up and creating single blocks.

When you run the RPO system and you get blitzed you get single blocks, and our answer is that we've got to win one-on-ones. They won the one-on-ones on the perimeter more than we did.

Q. You mentioned many of the things your team accomplished. What was the message you wanted to convey to your guys in that room?

DAVE CLAWSON: Just we're disappointed that we didn't win tonight, and we kind of covered the reasons we didn't win, which I shared with you.

We really didn't execute offensively in the second half at all. We gave our defense too many short fields. We had four turnovers. You play a good football team, you lose the turnover battle 4-0. But this shouldn't be the overriding memory of the season. We had a great season. We're champions of the Atlantic Division.

We wanted to be ACC champions, but this is still a championship football team, and we have a chance to go get a bowl championship.

I'm up here right now and I'm gutted. I mean, I'm dying inside and I know our players are. But time heals all wounds, and tomorrow will be rough and Monday will be not good, but Tuesday will get better, and we'll start getting on our bowl opponent and we'll try to go get that one, try to go get win No. 11, which would be a great accomplishment.

Q. After those three first possessions that you scored the touchdowns, did they make any adjustments that kind of took you out of what you wanted to do?

DAVE CLAWSON: I mean, they run their defense. They started blitzing a little more and pressuring a little more and creating more single blocks. We just didn't make plays. They got on edges. Our protection probably wasn't as good as it usually is.

But again, when teams do that against us we have to win on the perimeter, and we weren't winning quick enough. Again, that's a credit to Pitt. They covered us. They did. They probably defended us as well as any football team has this year.

Q. You talked this week about the defensive yo-yo, and I think maybe you got to see a decent performance again from that unit, but just as far as what you were seeing when the game was tight, were you pleased enough with what they were doing to keep the team in the game?

DAVE CLAWSON: Yeah. I mean, you look at 45 points, but how many short fields and off of punts and off of interceptions and they had a pick six, and, you know, it's eerily similar to a game we had in the same stadium a year ago.

I thought our defense certainly played well enough for us to win if we play our typical offensive game, but with, again, the turnovers and the short fields off of the punt returns, it wasn't enough.

We knew this game, if we were going to win it, we were probably going to have to win it 41-34 or something like that. Again, I thought we played better on defense than the score indicates.

Q. Does the lack of a routine in terms of not having an opponent next week and the kids having to go to finals next week, does that make it even tougher to get back on the right side mentally and get prepared for a bowl game?

DAVE CLAWSON: You know, it's at the end of every season. Tonight there were 12 ACC teams disappointed they weren't in this game, and there's two that were excited to be here, and one is going to leave holding a trophy and feeling great about themselves, and the other is going to feel gutted and disappointed. That's the nature of competitive athletics.

Our guys will rebound. We played a good team. It's not like we played an average football team and blew all these opportunities. They were good. A lot of our errors today were because of how good Pitt is, and I give those guys all the credit.

Q. Along the lines of rebounding, what is your feeling on Sam at this point having overcome all that he overcame since last year and then being back in this stadium and having another four-interception game?

DAVE CLAWSON: Yeah, I don't think one game -- look at the year he had. Sometimes when you fall behind, you force things. You watch all the different championship games this weekend, and those plays happened a lot. You watch -- I was watching the Cincinnati-Houston game and then Houston fell behind and maybe forced to throw because they're trying to make a play.

This does not take away from the year he had. He bounced back after last year. He's disappointed. He puts a lot on himself. I'm confident he'll bounce back. He's mentally tough, and he's our leader, and he's a great quarterback, and he'll be fine.

Q. In a year where you have few losses, sometimes there are common threads in those losses. Is there anything from this game that you feel like you saw in the other games you lost this year?

DAVE CLAWSON: Yeah, in our three losses I think we turned the ball over nine times. If you take away those games -- we were the No. 1 team in the ACC in turnover margin. We created 27. We didn't get any today. We, again, don't turn the ball over, and today we had four.

In our losses we turned it over four times today, three times against Clemson, and two times against North Carolina. So more than half of our turnovers were in our three losses.

Q. Two specific instances I wanted to ask you about. Kenny on the first touchdown run looking like he was going to give himself up, have you ever seen anything like that --

DAVE CLAWSON: I've never, ever seen that before. You know, you just train your players, as soon as a quarterback starts sliding, you stop, because you touch him and it's going to be a penalty. He started his slide, and our kids stopped playing.

I mean, I don't think he did it intentionally. If he did, he's brilliant. I just think he reacted as an athlete. But what do you tell your players? The quarterback is protected and you start a slide, and there's two guys that could have made a play that stopped playing because he started to slide.

That is certainly something for the rule book that I think that's something they have to look at and come up with a rule for. There's no rule for it, so the officials were correct in letting it go. They made the correct ruling by not blowing it dead.

But I said, If that's the rule, I'll just have my guy fake kneeing all the way down the field, and really what do you do. It's something that I think the NCAA is going to have to look at. You can't fake a slide.

Q. After the pick six, Sam was kind of there on the bench by himself for a little while; you went over and said something to him. What did you want to tell him in that moment?

DAVE CLAWSON: I said, This does not take away from the season you had. It's not d�j�-vu all over again. You've had a great year. You're a big, big reason why we're here. We did not lose this game because of that. They outplayed us.

Sometimes you leave a game and you're mad and you feel you lost to a lesser football team. I thought Pitt outplayed us today. If we had won that game, we had stolen it. They outplayed us at the line of scrimmage. They executed better than we did. They deserved to win that game.

Sam, I don't want him to blame himself. This was not like the bowl game a year ago that he -- he's had a great year, and this one game and a few throws does not take away from that.

Q. Along the lines of Sam, a little easier because you've got another game to play. I'm sure he's going to come out fired up for that one.

DAVE CLAWSON: Yeah. I mean, I'll tell you what, even if you have a good year, it's a long year. It is 13 games and 14 weeks and it is -- we're tired. I'm sure Pitt is, too. We're probably a little more tired now because we lost.

Sometimes it's let's get a little break and our players have finals and we've got to make sure we do well in those and finish up the semester strong academically, and then the bowl game is fun because finals are over, we can just do football, we can do events with them that we couldn't do a year ago.

We'll go to someplace probably where the weather is warm this year, which we've not been able to do before, and we'll have a great experience.

The bowls are -- they're great experiences, and I hope people don't lose sight of that as they want to keep building this playoff thing.

Q. Obviously you've seen Kenny Pickett on tape. What are your thoughts as you walk away from this game, and what type of quarterback do you think he might be at the next level?

DAVE CLAWSON: You know, I always try to avoid answering those next-level questions because I'm not an NFL coach. I'm not an NFL scout. Kenny Pickett is a winner. He's a great competitor. He has physical skills. He appears to have all those intangible leadership qualities that make a quarterback great. I certainly have great admiration for how he plays the game.

He's a winner and he's a competitor that I have a ton of respect for. He earned this thing. He really did. He earned the Player of the Year and he earned the championship.

Q. From the smiles and bright eyes your players came in with today to their faces when the clock hit triple zeros, how do you guide them through that array of emotions?

DAVE CLAWSON: Well, you want them to be disappointed. They're competitors. We're not happy to be here. We wanted to win it. But you also have to have perspective. We've had a great season. We've had some incredible wins and some great celebrations, and there were two really good teams here tonight, and one of them was going to leave unhappy. We wanted it to be Pitt, but it's us.

But again, I want them to be disappointed. I want them to be upset. That tells me that they care and they're invested and it matters.

It does matter to our team.

There's nothing I can say that can take away that pain right now. You just hope as time goes on and this gets more in the rear view mirror that that disappointed is a little bit overshadowed by everything they've accomplished this year.

To have 25,000 Wake Forest people here tonight, they created that moment, and I'm really proud of them. One game or one loss will never change that.