Wake Forest’s coach and Louisville’s AD greatly differ on how much strategy was affected by game plan leaks

2016’s hottest college football scandal involves a former Wake Forest assistant coach and radio analyst leaking play calls and other proprietary material to Deacs opponents. It’s been dubbed Wakeyleaks, because 2016.

Friday, Wake Forest head coach Dave Clawson went on ESPN Radio and detailed some of the nitty gritty surrounding what happened before and during the matchup against Louisville, which is the linchpin for this whole thing blowing up.

The key parts here are twofold. First, of course, is the timeline. Louisville’s equipment staff told Clawson they found material on Friday while setting the locker room up, and presented it to the Wake staff the next day under the assumption it wasn’t anything special.

But here’s where things get fishy from the Louisville side.

“Louisville is an excellent football team, and it was a game we felt, in order to score points we had to have some wrinkles,” Clawson said. “And all those wrinkles were right in front of us. And at that point, we knew we had been compromised. And as a result, a lot of those things we had prepared, we couldn’t run because we knew they had it.”

Wake Forest says the materials included special formations that hadn’t previously been run, including empty sets. Louisville AD Tom Jurich in a statement Wednesday waved off the info Louisville obtained as no big deal.

Jurich might be right, if none of the plays were run in the game, but now we know why, according to Wake Forest. So the information gathered by Louisville had a chilling effect on Wake Forest’s play calling, so much so the players were doubly upset following a tough loss because they were shackled from a scheme standpoint.

“They wanted to know why did we work on all these things and not, why did we practice them all week and not use them. They felt we had not given them the best opportunity to win the game.”

Wake Forest led the game, 12-10, into the fourth quarter and ended up losing late, 44-12. They put special plays in but couldn’t open up the full toolbox and on top of that lost the game in blowout fashion by the end, 44-12.