Sports > September 10, 2003

By Jason Mazda

Assistant Sports Editor

In case you haven’t heard, the Wake Forest football team is the 20th-ranked team in the nation according to the Associated Press Poll.

If there is a single Wake Forest fan that can say honestly that he foresaw this case two weeks ago, I would like to shake his hand. I’ll admit it, I predicted the team would go 7-5, and I thought that was optimism.

Head Coach Jim Grobe said last year when he signed a 10-year contract extension that his goal was to raise the football team to the level of the Deacon basketball team: a consistently nationally-ranked team. Well Deacon fans, Coach Grobe has wasted no time in getting started.

Coach Grobe and the football team are doing their job. Now it’s time for the students, the alumni and the community to do theirs. We need to start packing Groves Stadium. That means no more games where we play a local rival like N.C. State and their fans outnumber ours in attendance.

Sure, we’re a small school. Some may say it’s impossible for Wake Forest to fill Groves Stadium. But everyone said it was impossible for Wake Forest to beat N.C. State, let alone become nationally ranked, and they did it.

Coach Grobe’s success here is unheard of. He inherited a 2-9 team in 2001. That year, he led them to a 6-5 winning record and bowl eligibility. The following season, he led the team to a 7-6 record, including a blowout win in the Seattle Bowl over Oregon, a nationally prominent football program. This year, many people predicted that even with a strong team, the Deacs would start the season 0-3 against three top-tier teams. However, Grobe’s gang knocked off Boston College on the road to open the season. On a side note, the following week BC proved that they are no slouch by dominating No. 25 Penn State. The Deacs followed that up by destroying N.C. State in a game in which a scarce few thought they even had a shot.

That brings us to the present. Just two weeks into his third season, Coach Grobe has taken that 2-9 team and made it so good that there are whispers of an ACC title and even a BCS bid.

It’s nice seeing our school in the headlines for football. If we want this good fortune to continue, we’d better start giving the team the fan attention they deserve.

Last year, we almost lost an excellent basketball coach in Skip Prosser, when his hometown Pittsburgh Panthers came calling. He stayed at Wake Forest in large part because of the fan support for him and his Deacon basketball team. Let’s make sure Coach Grobe feels the same as Coach Prosser.

Think about it