In the new age of college football, it’s rare for anyone to stay in the same place for long, whether a coach or player.
With the introduction of name, image and likeness (NIL) in 2021, money talks louder than ever before in the NCAA, as athletes are essentially free agents at the end of each season. There are both players and coaches who opt for the greater paycheck rather than the greater impact.
This was not the case for Youngstown native Dave Clawson during his 11-year head coaching tenure at Wake Forest.
Clawson turned down opportunities from other teams to stick with a program that not only gave him their full support, but aligned with his personal values. He found success within a program many didn’t have confidence in, and a team that was historically bad at football.
People doubted Wake Forest because the school is small and academically-challenging, making it hard to get accepted.
“I wanted to flip it and say, ‘We are going to be good, because there’s not going to be another school in the country that you can play this level of football at that you’re going to get a personalized education,’” Clawson said. “All those things that made Wake Forest distinctive, and the reasons that people had given for us not being able to win, were going to be the reasons that we won.”
Under Clawson’s leadership, the Demon Deacons went to seven consecutive bowl games after the program went to seven from 1980 to 2015. He was the ACC coach of the year in 2021 after tying a program-record 11 wins and the school’s second ever trip to the conference championship game.
He is also the only head coach on record with double-digit win seasons at four Division I programs. Prior to joining Wake Forest at the end of 2013, he was a head coach at Fordham (1999-03), Richmond (2004-07) and Bowling Green (2009-13).
Before becoming a head coach, Clawson was the quarterbacks and running backs coach at the University of Albany in 1989 and a graduate assistant in 1990 helping out the secondary, and was an assistant coach at the University at Buffalo, Lehigh and Villanova. He had an unsuccessful one-season stint as an offensive coordinator for Tennessee in 2008.
Clawson, who has coached for nearly 40 years and spent a majority of his life on a team, realized early into his coaching career that success on the field is a reflection of relationships and not necessarily a mirror of how many times you practiced schemes or how much thought was placed into developing strategies.
These relations need to be founded on trust, but also the understanding that no two players have had the exact same life experiences.
“You’ve got to treat everybody fairly, but not everybody the same,” said Clawson. “Every player comes from a different background — a different family background, a different school background, a different demographic background.”
Clawson embodies the idea that football is more than a game, as seen with the long-lasting relations he’s developed throughout the years, leading to former players reaching out to him with kind words when his retirement was announced.
He sees his players as people and cares about them, wanting them to become better men.
“When I first got to Wake Forest, my goal, my vision, was that we would be a championship football program that would graduate players with high GPAs, and we would develop successful men on and off the field,” Clawson said. “That they would have really bright futures when their football career was over.”
Given his own love for the game and coaching, why step away from the field now?
Being a college coach is very demanding and requires a lot of hours to be put in, meaning a lot of time and experiences missed off of the field. Clawson expressed his desire to be able to “enjoy life” and no longer have to miss important events for his friends and family.
The addition of NIL also put smaller schools like Wake Forest at a disadvantage, as they do not have the same resources as a big school like Ohio State, which secured $20 million in NIL deals for athletes in 2024 alone. However, starting in 2025 revenue sharing will be implemented for D-I schools, meaning athletes will be paid from the schools’ athletic department revenue.
Wake Forest is transitioning into a “new era” of ball, and Clawson felt that if he stepped down it would give the program a fresh start. He’ll be there to help out for a short period of time to help the new head coach, Jake Dickert, lay the foundation and get settled.
Clawson will remain part of Wake Forest University but serve as special adviser to the vice president and director of athletics, focusing on things such as fundraising and analyzing other coaching styles that could be implemented within their own athletic program, but will take a short sabbatical after helping with the head coaching transition.
He added that he is looking forward to being able to visit his hometown more often now, and even credited Lewiston and Niagara Falls for getting him to where he is today.
“I always felt that my work ethic and my resilience always came from my Western New York roots,” Clawson said. “I’m proud of where I come from.”