Jim Grobe has no qualms about soberly assessing last season and identifying it for what it was: an absolute wreck.
Hard to sugar-coat much of anything that occurred during the 3-9 campaign that included five losses of 31 points or more.
Grobe was kind enough to spend some time with Tigerillustrated.com recently as part of our "Enemy Lines" series previewing Clemson's 2011 opponents. And he offered some interesting revelations, including the fact that he basically got a head start on spring practice when things started getting really bad.
Here goes:
TI: What are some notable things so far during camp you've seen with your team?
GROBE: "Just how much we've matured. Last year we had 13 freshmen start at least a game, and for us that's disaster. We had I think three true freshmen and 10 redshirts start at least a game for us. And at Wake, our success has been built off developing players and playing lots of juniors and seniors. When we don't have that, we're not very good.
"The biggest thing for me from last year is seeing how much we've matured and how much better the kids are with X's and O's in knowing the offense and the defense. They're playing with a little bit more confidence, and they certainly move around faster because they know more what to do."
TI: At what point last year did you say to yourself, "This could get really bad?"
GROBE: "We had a bad loss at Stanford, but that was really early in the year and I really thought that was kind of an anomaly to go out there and get whipped that bad -- the long trip, all the young kids and all that. But we came back and lost two heart-breakers to Georgia Tech and Navy, games that went right to the end of the fourth quarter. And I guess I had blinders on. I just didn't realize how many young kids we were counting on to win. And then we got whipped pretty good down at Florida State, and from that point on we pretty much started spring practice.
"We started spending a lot of time in practice with fundamentals -- blocking, tackling, just working more on us during the week than we did game plans for the other teams. Because we realized that for the first time since we've been at Wake Forest, we really had at least a handful of games that we weren't even competitive in. We had a reputation for taking teams into the fourth quarter and winning our share of those, and last year we weren't even able to take most teams into the fourth quarter.
"Once we realized we were so young and playing so poorly at times, the best thing for us to do was make sure we didn't give up on the season, but we really felt like unless we blocked and tackled better and taught better we weren't going to be able to beat anybody. And by the end of the year we'd gotten a lot better.'
TI: It sounds like you're going to go back to the spread and use quarterback Tanner Price as a runner while also using your receivers as runners off the orbit motion and other horizontal stuff. Can you describe your offensive identity in 2011?
GROBE: "One of the issues that we had last year, we really expected to go back to our roots in option offense. We were an option team when I was an assistant at Air Force, and when I was at Ohio University we were a huge option team. And even when we first came to Wake Forest, we had quite a bit of option in our attack. And as the years went on, especially when we got Riley Skinner at quarterback, Riley was not an option guy but he threw the ball pretty well, so we had to almost coach ourselves into being more drop-back, more pro-style.
"Last year with Ted Stachitas and Sky Jones we spent the entire spring and August going back to our roots in option football. We got into the first couple of games, and we hadn't finished our first two games before Stachitas and Jones were down with injuries, and we had to go with our freshman in Price. So what we ended up doing last year was going back to Riley Skinner's offense after spending the whole spring and summer on option football. It was a tough year. Tanner is not a bad runner. He's just not an option quarterback.
"This year, we're a little bit of option but not nearly as much as we planned on running last year."
TI: So Tanner is your guy right now?
GROBE: "Tanner is the guy; I don't think there's any question about it right now. One of Ted's problems is he's doing a really nice job for us right now, but his issue has always been durability. Any time he's had to play for very many snaps, he's gotten hurt. He hurt his hand in one game last year, his back in another game. You've got to be durable to be an option quarterback.
"In our camp right now, we just don't hit our quarterbacks. We'll wrap them up, but we don't take them to the ground. So for Ted, it's going to be hard for him to compete with Tanner because we're not going to find out if he's durable or not until we get into the season. I'd think somewhere along the course he's going to get a chance to play a little bit, and if he proves he can stay durable he's good enough to help us win, I think. But right now it's Tanner Price. And unless Tanner gets banged up, I would think it's going to stay that way for a while until Ted has an opportunity to really go out and get some live reps against the good guys."
TI: You have said your defense was shy about contact last year. Was this the product of youth, and has it been resolved to the point that the defense can be a lot better?
GROBE: "I think it was youth. I think if you looked at our starting lineups, at times we didn't start six or seven freshmen. But there were times we had six or seven freshmen on the field at the same time. And for Wake Forest, that's just disaster. I mean, we just cannot play that many freshmen.
"We were in that position last year where some older guys we had didn't play as well as they needed to and the young guys were better. And in some cases, some of the older guys that we'd recruited back in the day weren't still around -- either from an academic perspective or transfer or graduated early. So we just didn't have a lot of seniors, and there were times I looked on the field where we had six or seven freshmen on the field at the same time on defense. For us, we're just not capable of doing that.
"One thing I've noticed is our kids are playing more full-speed right now. Last year, I thought part of the softness defensively was in hesitation and not being real confident in what to do. We kind of in mid-stream went from a four-man front to a three-man alignment, and that involved some different ways to get lined up and call our defense. The combination of being young and physically not real mature yet, and then not having a great grasp of the schemes on defense, slowed our kids down to the point that we not only were soft but we just didn't play full speed because we were thinking too much. There was nothing we could do about it. That's just the way we were.
"This fall, the kids have heard the same calls over and over and over again. We're getting guys to the football a lot better than we did last year."
Tigerillustrated.com thanks Grobe for sharing his time and insights.
LW
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