Analysis: Wake Forest’s Mayo Bowl blowout stings, but great things are ahead

It’s not much of a balancing act, Wake Forest offensive lineman Sean Maginn said, of wanting to take time to digest the season versus anxiousness to start the next season.

“I know we only played nine games, we usually play 13, but it felt like we played 20 games. We’re just all mentally on E,” Maginn said.

The Demon Deacons’ 42-28 loss to Wisconsin on Wednesday in the Duke’s Mayo Bowl capped a 4-5 season — all of the wins were in October for the team that played the fewest regular-season games in the ACC.

“I think we’ve really set ourselves up to have a really good football team in ’21. But ’21 is a long time from now,” Wake Forest coach Dave Clawson said. “This one is going to sting for a few weeks, and I think our guys need a break and they need a rest and they need to get away and see their families.”

Wake Forest prepared for 13 games this season and played nine of them – games against Notre Dame, Duke, Miami and Florida State were canceled.

By the end, players weren’t able to mask the exhaustion that probably set in deepest when the Demon Deacons had to press pause for a month because of positive COVID-19 tests and contact tracing.

“We all just need to go home, see our family, just get away from it for a couple of weeks and I think that’ll be good for this team,” Maginn said. “When we come back in late January, we’re going to get after it, for sure.”

Wake Forest will be getting after it in 2021 with just about every player who was on the field at Bank of America Stadium on Wednesday, plus injured players as they return and with another promising recruiting class.

All three of Wake Forest’s senior captains for this game — cornerback Ja’Sir Taylor, tight end Brandon Chapman and safety Luke Masterson — have said they’re coming back next season. The fourth captain is quarterback Sam Hartman, who wrapped up his third season in the program and has three years of eligibility remaining.

After postgame interviews Wednesday, you can add slot receiver Jaquarii Roberson and rover Traveon Redd to the expanding list of fourth- and fifth-year players, respectively, planning to return.

“I’ve still got a lot more work to do,” Redd said.

About two hours after Wednesday’s game, senior linebacker Ja’Cquez Williams tweeted that he’s returning for next season — meaning, barring an unexpected transfer, all 11 starters for Wake Forest’s defense in the bowl game will return next season.

That’s paired with an offense that appears will return 10 of 11 starters from Wednesday’s game — the only who might not be is Taleni Suhren, who started in place of Loic Ngassam Nya (another returning player).

“It seems like we’re going to have a lot of players coming back that are going to be key factors, pretty much both sides of the ball,” Redd said. “I feel like we’re going to have a very promising season next year.”

Clawson has had his share of experienced teams at Wake Forest, with 8-5 records in 2017 and 2019 standing out.

Next season’s roster lines up to be more experienced — and it’s the suspension of the 85-scholarship-player limit that could provide the Deacons with the depth they’ve been searching for the past few seasons.

The 2021 season feels simultaneously close and far away — the first game will be sometime in late August or early September, while the work that goes into the season will start when players return to campus in January.

It’s work that Wake Forest, and every program in the country, was shortchanged on this year.

“There’s a part of me that’s amazed we even got to where we got this year, missing all the weight rooms and spring practices we did,” Clawson said. “I say it again and again, but we’re a developmental program. And when a developmental program doesn’t get to develop, it’s hard.

“And all of those gains we typically make March, April, May, June, we didn’t get to make those this year.”

For the second straight year, Wake Forest will carry a bowl loss into the offseason — and now the optimism stems from being able to have a normalized offseason compared to last year’s.

When players reconvene in Winston-Salem in a few weeks, the rested Demon Deacons will get to work on the next season.

“I’m definitely going to miss the boys for a little while,” Roberson said. “We go back to school in like three weeks, but give me about two or three days, I’ll be ready to be back with them going to work.”

In two days, it’ll be 2021.

This story was originally published December 30, 2020 at 6:57 PM.