Wake Forest coach: Staff found game plan on Louisville sideline day before game
Wake Forest coach Dave Clawson said his team became aware that Louisville had an idea of its game preparations the day before the Demon Deacons were set to play the Cardinals.
Clawson, appearing on ESPN Radio’s Mike and Mike on Friday morning, said members of Wake Forest’s equipment staff found detailed play information on the sideline as the locker room was being set up. That discovery set off the investigation that led to the firing of radio announcer Tommy Elrod this week.
Elrod, a Wake graduate, was not retained as a member of Wake Forest’s coaching staff when Clawson came to the team in 2014. Clawson said Elrod was “extremely professional” when he was told he wouldn’t be returning to the coaching staff.
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“When we arrived for our game against Louisville [Nov. 12], our equipment staff had found materials on our sideline the Friday when they set up the locker room. You’re not allowed to get there until a certain time, the assumption being they’re having their walk-through there.
And our equipment people found cards just laying right on our sideline and didn’t think much of it. And then the day of the game we got there about an hour before and we found — the equipment manager presented our offensive coordinator with the cards and said I don’t think this is any big deal. It was just a lot of stuff that we do normally. Our offensive coordinator flipped through it and there was very, very detailed information there.
Formations that we had never run, alignments, even some of it was maybe some empty sets that we had never run before. But some of it was even sets we had run but we had flipped personnel. Louisville is an excellent football team and it was a game that we felt in order to score points we had to have some wrinkles in. And all of 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 that we had prepared we couldn’t run because we knew they had it. After the game, our players were upset. They wanted to know why did we work on all these things and not — why did we practice these things all week and not use them. They felt we did not give them the best opportunity to win the game.
So we had a team meeting and told them, hey guys, something was compromised, we’re not sure how. At that point it triggered an investigation.
Louisville said Wednesday that an assistant coach — who coached at Wake Forest previously — had received proprietary information from Elrod, but that the information had no benefit because Wake Forest didn’t run the plays the team was told about. And it’s apparent, at least from Wake Forest’s point of view, that the plays weren’t run because the school knew Louisville had the information.
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Elrod moved to the booth in 2014 after he wasn’t retained as a coach. Clawson said he considered Elrod “almost as part of the team” because of his radio duties. When asked if he had spoken to Elrod since his dismissal, Clawson simply responded with a “no.”
Virginia Tech said Thursday that a former assistant coach had received inside info from Elrod before a game in 2014, though it didn’t believe that the info impacted the game. And, unlike Louisville, the Hokies apologized for the issue.
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Nick Bromberg is the assistant editor of Dr. Saturday on Yahoo Sports. Have a tip? Email him at nickbromberg@yahoo.com or follow him on Twitter!
