Wake Forest competes, and wins, but is it enough in a shifting landscape?

Editor’s note: This story is part of an occasional series about the future of the ACC, and college athletics, and questions facing both in a rapidly changing landscape. In this installment, reporter Andrew Carter explores how Wake Forest, the nation’s smallest major-conference school, is navigating a changing landscape that has placed more of an emphasis on brand size and football following.

The answer came easily to John Currie, now in his fourth year as the athletics director at Wake Forest, and that was no accident. He launched into a story of doubt and overcoming, an allegory of sorts for everything Wake Forest now faces in these times of immense change and uncertainty throughout college athletics.

It was just another obstacle in a long line of them, this perception that the ACC was slowly dying and, with it, Wake’s chances to retain its place. It was just another moment of questioning or doubt, like when the university almost didn’t reopen after the Civil War, Currie said, or when it moved to Winston-Salem in 1956.

The school didn’t have its own football stadium in those days and for a long time didn’t really have its own basketball home, either. Along the way, Currie said, a familiar theme emerged, at least as it relates to college sports, and kept repeating, a perception that again and again has proven to be more myth than reality: “All these moments in time where there’s no way for us to compete, right?”

“Every moment in the history of time, there was no way Wake Forest was going to be able to do it,” he said, a hint of sarcasm in his tone, again referencing that perception. “And every time we’ve done it and again, here we are, 2023, the strongest we’ve ever been, and much stronger, comparatively, with the whole deal than many other schools, in our league and other leagues.”

And that was it. Currie’s response to the concern, however fair or unfair, that a school like Wake Forest, the nation’s smallest among those in a major conference, might be left without a seat in this slow-moving game of NCAA musical chairs. It was a game whose pace had picked up in recent years, with Texas and Oklahoma announcing in 2021 that they were leaving the Big 12 for the SEC, and USC and UCLA announcing last year that they were leaving the Pac-12 for the Big Ten.

Yet it was a game, too, with which Currie, 52, had long grown familiar. He was a student at Wake Forest in the early 1990s, with an eye toward a career in college athletics administration, when Florida State joined the ACC in 1991. He was the athletics director at Kansas State in the late 2000s and early 2010s when its conference, the Big 12, became an epicenter of bickering and backstabbing, center stage of major college athletics’ enduring soap opera.

Sitting last week in his humble office, one of the few athletics-related spaces at Wake that hasn’t undergone a massive transformation, Currie went back in time. He recalled the so-called “Trojan Horse meeting” of 2009, when administrators from the Big 12 and Pac-10, as it was then known, came together in the Arizona desert and discussed ways they could collaborate. Only to find out, Currie said, that Larry Scott, then the new commissioner of the Pac-10, was “basically working directly with Texas and trying to form what was going to be the Pac-16.”

The next year, “that’s when everything hit the fan,” Currie said. Nebraska announced its decision to leave for the Big Ten. Colorado left to join what’d become the Pac-12. Among Currie and his peers in the Big 12, fear and loathing became contagious. The consternation reached something of a peak during a 2010 meeting in Kansas City where, as Currie put it, there was the feeling that “the conference is going to collapse. And there’s people arguing across the table and stuff like that.”

He mentioned all of this last week to convey a larger point: That, “it’s just been constant.” That realignment and all the speculation surrounding it is the way of the college athletics world, and always has been and maybe always will be. It wasn’t anything new. And besides, Wake Forest now found itself in the midst of perhaps its greatest stretch of sustained athletics success in history — “our strongest point ever,” as Currie described it.

The Demon Deacons’ top-ranked baseball team was about to host, and easily defeat, Alabama in a Super Regional. By Sunday, after outscoring the Crimson Tide 27-9 over two games, Wake was onto the College World Series for the first time since 1955. Its women’s golf team, meanwhile, appeared at the White House last Monday in recognition of its national championship. In football, Wake owns the ACC’s second-longest bowl streak, and a conference championship in the not-so distant past — something neither North Carolina nor N.C. State could say. In men’s basketball, Steve Forbes has injected energy into a program that had lost its way.

These are fine times, indeed, to be a Wake Forest supporter. Arguably the best of times.

Between the lines of competition, nobody could dispute that the university has proven its worth and that it belongs and deserves to compete at the highest level. The question, the one for which Currie spent a lot of time trying to perfect the right answer, was whether it was all enough, for one. It was how much all the winning, between the lines, meant in a time when brand size and television ratings seemed to matter above all. It was how Wake Forest could ensure it wouldn’t be left behind.

Changing landscape

These were not new questions, necessarily, but ones that for Wake had become more urgent over the past year or so. The news in 2021 of the SEC’s impending expansion was one thing. Then came the drama of last summer, with two California schools laying bare their intent to abandon their West Coast roots for a league based in the Midwest, and one that just so happened to have the wealthiest media rights deal in the billion-dollar enterprise of major college athletics.

So ignited something of a nationwide panic. Aspects of it weren’t new, as Currie argued, but parts of it were. For the first time, the long term future of the ACC came to be in serious doubt. The conference’s demise was and is not imminent; the league’s grant of media rights agreement runs through 2036, and has proven so far to be ironclad. Even so. The Big Ten news inspired an avalanche of speculation; it reinforced the notion that the Power Five had become a Power Two, and that it was only a matter of time before the Big Ten and SEC absorbed those schools it wanted — regardless of where they might be, now — and discarded a group of left-behinds in their wake.

In the ACC, everyone from school administrators to boosters to fans began sizing each other up, judging themselves and others on their desirability. There were those whose futures looked secure no matter what might happen, a select club including the likes of Clemson, Florida State, Miami, North Carolina and Virginia. There were those with large enough football followings, at least, to provide confidence that they’d wind up somewhere. Then there was a collection of smaller, private schools that suddenly didn’t appear to be ideal fits in a world driven by brand size and TV ratings, at least in the one sport that now drives everything in major college sports.

There was some irony, then, in what transpired last weekend in Winston-Salem. On Friday night, it was difficult to go anywhere downtown and not run into a group of Alabama fans who’d made the trip to support their baseball team in the Super Regional. At a brewpub and hamburger joint called Small Batch, more than a dozen of those fans passed around shots and rounds of beer, their glasses clinking together every time they toasted to a cry of “Roll Tide!” By the next afternoon, after Wake’s 5-4 victory, they might have been ready for another round or three. If not then, then certainly after the next day, and the Crimson Tide’s 22-5 defeat.

“It’s not an accident,” Currie said of the baseball team’s success, before he detailed the investment the school had made in the program, one that allowed everything from stadium upgrades to the creation of a data- and analytics-driven pitching lab that has generated national buzz. “This is not a Cinderella story. This is not the Little Engine That Could. This is a jet engine. And it’s a jet engine with intentional investment on all those factors that will make Wake Forest strong.”

And yet compared to Alabama, a behemoth of a college athletics brand and one backed both by the riches of the SEC and a legion of supporters who view following the Crimson Tide more like a religion than a recreational pastime, Wake Forest did resemble something like the Little Engine That Could. Alabama’s place at college sports’ most prestigious table will never be in doubt. It’s part of a relatively small group that will likely determine who has an invitation to that table, over the next 10 or 15 years.

Wake, meanwhile, keeps proving that a school’s brand and size only means so much, at least on the field. Its rivals in the ACC already know. In football, Wake has defeated N.C. State in four of their past six meetings, with some of those victories dashing the Wolfpack’s hopes of reaching the ACC’s championship game.

The Demon Deacons have lost three straight against North Carolina, though by a total of 11 points — a much narrower margin than the schools’ recruiting rankings in that sport would portend.

And while Michael Alford, the Florida State athletics director, has been bullish about the ACC’s need for an unequal revenue sharing model and outspoken about the brand value the Seminoles provide the conference, a discomforting fact has followed FSU in recent years: Its football team, winners of three national championships and once the standard both nationally and in the ACC, has lost three consecutive games against Wake Forest.

“Everybody’s under different kinds of pressure on their campus,” Currie, reciting ACC Commissioner Jim Phillips’ recent messaging, said in response to Alford’s bravado. “And I believe everybody wants the same thing. Everybody wants the strongest possible ACC.”

He went on to list the NCAA team championships every ACC school has won: “Florida State, they’ve got 10. And we’ve got 10. So we’re both going to do our part to make the ACC stronger.”

Last month, during the ACC’s annual spring meetings on Amelia Island, Alford backed down from some of his strongest commentary. He’d spoken in blunt terms leading into those meetings about Florida State’s value and how the university wouldn’t stand for the ACC falling farther and farther behind the Big Ten and SEC in revenue. Now he spoke in more conciliatory and familial tones.

It’d been a long three days at the meetings, which began, on a Monday in mid-May, amid a report that seven ACC schools — Clemson, Florida State, Miami, North Carolina, N.C. State, Virginia and Virginia Tech — had met on their own to evaluate the strength of the league’s grant of rights. The news itself wasn’t particularly noteworthy; every school, including Wake Forest, Currie said, has explored the strength of the grant of the rights. But in a testament to social media, it took on a life of its own.

Suddenly, the demise of the ACC seemed immediately imminent, even if it wasn’t. Suddenly, schools like Wake Forest were destined to be left on the scrap heap of college sports, forgotten, regardless of reality.

“Here we go,” Nina King, the Duke athletic director, said last month, partly referring to the reality of a more-is-never-enough business but more referring to the never-ending cycle of speculation. Behind closed doors, Phillips met with the league’s athletic directors and tried to express empathy.

“He said the truth,” Currie said, “which is that everybody’s under pressure now. And there’s massive pressure on different campuses. ... And there’s all kinds of things that are going on out there that are causing pressure.

“There’s pressure on higher education in general, right now. And we have this convergence of circumstances that are so disruptive. It’s just a massively uncertain time. And so as a result, you’ve got a lot of anxious people.”

Currie and his colleagues spoke among themselves for a while, spread out around tables arranged in a U in a big conference room. They shared grievances and frustrations and tried to present a united front when the doors swung open and they walked out. Nobody stopped for interviews with reporters that day; Currie walked past and playfully asked if anyone wanted to talk about Wake’s baseball team.

The narrative of the meetings, though, had been set, right or wrong. How could the ACC’s largest and smallest brands coexist? How could the conference find its way in these times of enormous — and growing — revenue disparity? Could an unequal revenue sharing model — the kind of which the league soon announced, based on postseason performance — make a difference? Dave Clawson, the Demon Deacons’ football coach, again found himself defending his program.

“You control the controllables,” he said. “That’s what we control. We have made a huge institutional investment in football at Wake Forest. We’ve invested over $110 million in new facilities in the last seven years. We’re about to open up a brand new $38-$40 million locker room. We’ve won the second or third or fourth most games in the ACC in the last seven years. We have the second-longest bowl streak in the ACC.

“So if it’s based on-field success, I’m good with that model.”

He was talking about unequal revenue sharing. The same general thought on the future of college sports held, too.

Wake’s strategic spending

Currie reported for his first full-time job at Wake Forest in August 1993, a few months after his graduation from the same university. He walked into a back door of the Manchester Athletic Center and up a staircase and to a cubicle, where he spent much of his internship with the Deacon Club. So began a fast ascent.

By 1998 Currie had moved up to assistant athletic director at Wake; by 2000 he’d accepted a similar role at Tennessee; by 2009, then only 38, he’d become the athletics director at Kansas State. After a short and tumultuous tenure in the same role at Tennessee, he returned to his alma mater in 2019.

These days, Currie often enters his office after climbing those same old stairs, the ones he did as an intern in 1993. In 30 years, not a whole lot has changed about the look of the building. The football offices have moved out, for one. The tennis courts it used to house are gone. The weight room, modest even in those less-ostentatious times in college athletics, is no more.

Like the building itself the athletic director’s office — Currie’s office, now — has retained its humble charm. If, in fact, charm is the word for it. In a college athletics world more and more dictated by metrics, and in particular by ratings and conference payouts and budgets, Wake Forest has to rank at or near the bottom of the ACC in athletic director office square footage.

Currie noticed the contrast immediately upon his return. How could he not?

He’d come from those ill-fated 21 months at Tennessee, a place that did not treat him kindly — he was fired after a clumsy football coaching search — though one that nonetheless provided perspective, and a means of comparison. If Tennessee resides on one side of the college athletics power spectrum, what with its state flagship status and SEC wealth, then Wake, the perception goes, is on the other. The AD’s office is just another manifestation.

Currie last week took a quick look around at the generic furnishings and with the exception of some whiteboards and a newer television on the wall, “everything in here came from the surplus warehouse,” he said, and that “was intentional.”

“We didn’t spend any money in here,” he said. “I don’t even think we replaced the carpet. We did move the desk from that side to this side.”

Elsewhere, the university has spent hundreds of millions on athletics over the past decade. There’s visual proof of the investment throughout campus, where pristine, new-age facilities now blend into the traditional and garden-like aesthetic of campus, with its deep Baptist roots and endless acres of dogwoods and elms, magnolias and oaks.

In football alone, Wake has spent $150 million in facilities upgrades over the past decade, a sum that dispels the myth that football is an afterthought at the university, or that it hasn’t prioritized an effort to compete with its peers. Outside of that one sport, it has spent an additional $100 million in athletics facilities. Included in that $250 million overall total is the $38 million the university is spending on the construction of a new football locker room, set to open later this summer. Workers in hard hats last week had just finished installing several interior walls.

The new locker room, like other projects, did not begin until the university had secured the funding, which came entirely from donor contributions. With an undergraduate enrollment of about 5,500, Wake Forest cannot compete with the depth of alumni bases of larger state schools. It can, though, compete at the highest end of donor support, with a cadre of several deep-pocketed boosters who’ve been ready and willing to keep the university financially competitive in athletics.

With relatively few exceptions, Currie said, every sports-minded major-conference university “has got four or five or six families who are really hyper-invested in that particular school. And if you don’t have that, you’ve got a problem. ... And Wake Forest certainly has that.”

Mit Shah, a part-owner of the Atlanta Hawks and the founder of an investment firm based in the same city, is among those well-monied supporters. A 1991 Wake Forest graduate, his $5 million donation was a catalyst in the construction of Wake’s Shah Basketball Complex, which opened in 2019. The same year, Ben Sutton cut the ribbon during a ceremony to open the Sutton Sports Performance Center, a four-story, 87,000-square-foot facility that’s home to everything from an expansive weight room to high-tech training facilities.

Sutton, who completed his undergraduate degree at Wake Forest in 1980 and went on to earn his law degree from there in ‘83, provided the lead gift with a $20 million donation. During a recent interview he estimated he’d contributed $25 million over the years to his alma mater’s athletic department. He viewed the donations as a responsibility, and that was something he tried to convey to other alums and supporters in a position to contribute.

“They understand that at a place like Wake, that resourcing — there’s a greater sacrificial commitment that’s required at the top of the giving pyramid than there might be at a big state school like Alabama,” Sutton said.

If anyone understood the business of college athletics, it was Sutton. He’d first made his name in the industry in the early 1990s as the founder of ISP Sports, which grew into a college athletics media and marketing giant.

Sutton led ISP’s acquisition by IMG College, and then led the sale of IMG College, at a cost of $2.4 billion, in 2014. When he looked at the state of college athletics now — including everything from the unintended free agency brought on by the transfer portal and pay-for-play under the guise of name, image and likeness deals to the consolidation of brands brought on by realignment — he saw an enterprise without leadership, or an interest in self-preservation.

“There’s kind of a temporary insanity in the business right now,” Sutton said.

And: “The current way is really untenable.”

He favored a reinvention in which 60 to the top 75 college athletics programs would break away and create their own league. He recognized the antitrust concerns, the reasons why such a thing might never come to fruition. Though by not pursuing such a plan, he said, “college sports was leaving hundreds of millions of dollars on the table.”

At Wake Forest, where Sutton is a member of the university’s board of trustees, “there’s definitely concern,” he said, about “where we fit and where we ought to fit in the college sports landscape.” Yet he went back to the reality that the school finds itself in a “golden age,” what with the on-field success and the facilities. Even so, it could feel like a never-ending race — a question of how to keep up in a business in which more was never enough; in an enterprise of near-unparalleled excess.

“College athletics in general has not done a very good job of ever getting to a point when there was enough,” Currie said, calling it a “race to the bottom;” a competition of who could spend the most and generate the most and now, perhaps, who could bring the most to conferences that already distribute the most money, and will only keep giving out more and more.

At Wake, Currie and Sutton and others have tried to control what they could. They could keep competing. They could keep building. They could hope that mattered as much as they thought it should, while trying to prepare for what might come next. Outside of Winston-Salem, the forces pulling at college athletics continue to grow stronger. The ACC’s revenue disparity with its rival leagues, already hundreds of millions of dollars wide, will only become larger.

There are legal cases, including one in California that could pave the way for college athletes to become employees, that could further change the entire model and force schools to decide whether they’re still committed to big-time college athletics.

After decades in the business, Sutton counts among his friends many college athletics directors. He recently called one of them, from an ACC school, after the league’s spring meetings. The revelation that a group of schools had worked together to explore the strength of the grant of rights didn’t necessarily surprise Sutton but the secrecy, he said, “tests bonds in a league that has been known, more than any other in the history of college athletics, for collaboration and collegiality.”

Sutton wanted to glean insight from someone who was in the room, from an athletics director — and Sutton didn’t want to name him — from one of the schools who’d been grouped in the so-called Magnificent Seven exploring a possible exit.

And so Sutton posted a question to his friend: If the ACC fell apart, did he feel confident in a soft landing in an equivalent or stronger conference? No, the voice on the other end said, he possessed no such confidence.

For a moment, there was a sense of kinship in the uncertainty.