Gator Bowl Eve press conferences for Rutgers Football, Wake Forest
Rutgers and Wake Forest meet for the TaxSlayer Gator Bowl on Friday morning at 11:00 a.m. at TIAA Bank Stadium in Jacksonville, Fla.
Watch Scarlet Knights head coach Greg Schiano and players Julius Turner, Adam Korsak, and Noah Vedral as well as the Demon Deacons contingent talk to the media during their press conferences on Thursday below.
The transcripts can be found after the videos as well.
GREG SCHIANO: It's just a great honor to be here today. I want to thank everybody with the Gator Bowl, the City of Jacksonville. It's been a great experience. I would be lying if I didn't tell you a very hectic one. It's not usually the way you get ready for a bowl game with eight days notice, but we take it any way we can get it, and we're really, really happy about being here. Excited about playing in the game. The players have had a tremendous time, and now it's time to play. We're looking forward to it.
Q. Coach, at this point can we assume that you guys are going to be okay from a health standpoint to play the game?
GREG SCHIANO: Sure can.
Q. Second of all, looking back over the last six or seven days, you talked about the hectic nature of this, if somebody told you this was going to happen, were you surprised you were able to mobilize this quickly, in retrospect, and maybe what does that say for the people involved in your program for the fact that you were able to do that?
GREG SCHIANO: Well, that's exactly what I was going to say is that I'm not surprised because of the people who work at Rutgers and the players that we have at Rutgers. When A&M pulled out of the game, jokingly, I called one of my guys that works with us, and I said, "Hey, you want to go to a bowl game?" Literally joking. A half hour later he called back and, "Hey, that may not be too far from the truth." I called the people who head the departments. I said, "Can we do this?" They said, yes. I said, okay. I reached out and asked a few of the guys if they want to do it because I didn't want to be the only one that wanted to do it, and our players were great. "Let's go, Coach."
Before I could get to them all, Johnny Langan texted me, "Gator Bowl, let's go," with the gator emoji. These guys with the emojis. I kind of got the feel, okay, they want to do it, and then we waited to see if we were going to be the team that got to come.
Q. This is a question for Julius Turner. We've heard of the notion of "stay ready." How would you explain, let's say, the stay-ready mentality is helping you as you are preparing for this week's game?
JULIUS TURNER: What mentality? Stay red?
Q. Stay ready.
JULIUS TURNER: Stay ready. Oh, yeah. We have the kind of mentality, and we just always are ready for anything.
Like Coach said, I wasn't surprised how we got everybody up here. During COVID we've been through a lot, and
it's been so much that we have to be able to maneuver and work through. I knew he was going to have a plan
and have us prepared for everybody else to get up here. Yep, we're ready, and we're chopping too.
Q. Do you look at a bowl game as almost like an homage to players or your veteran guys to get them in and start
them, or as a building block and try to play as many young guys as possible and focus on 2022? How do you go
into it from that thinking?
GREG SCHIANO: Well, the bowl experience I look at as a reward for your team. I think you have to make that
something that they look back on as a great memory and enjoyable thing. Now, when you have the full time to
get ready, we do it differently. We have a phase one, which is developmental phase, and that is always the
young guys getting the predominance of the reps, so these guys would have come out maybe for 30, 40 minutes
just to stay in shape and do some football stuff and then they would go in, and the young kids would then
practice for an hour and a half, two hours.
We didn't get that. We had four practices to get ready. This was truly a game week, but in a regular setting once
you get to the site, we've always treated it, this is a reward for the guys, and that's why the game plan is always
installed before you get there. Then you shine it up at the bowl site. This has been different. This has been
putting the game plan together as we go, so that's why my voice sounds like it does.
Q. Coach Schiano, Dave Clawson the other day mentioned you made a little pit stop after his first year at Wake
Forest. What's your recollection of how the team looked then, and how do they look right now worrying about
the plan for tomorrow?
GREG SCHIANO: Dave and I have known each or for I guess it's been 30 years. He has made a few pit stops with
where I've worked. Many pit stops, actually. My wife and I were laughing this morning. We were probably both,
I don't know, 25, 26, had no money, so they came to visit. I was a GA at Penn State, and she made us -- I didn't
remember this, but she said, yeah, I cooked all of you dinner, and you sat there and drew on the board. I said,
oh, yeah, sounds like us. It's been 30 years and a great relationship.
Dave, I have the utmost respect for. He is a guy that I over the years have called and bounced things off and vice
versa. When I was down there, it was when I got let go at Tampa, I kind of went around on a world tour and
visited a lot of places. I really enjoyed that visit. Now I understand it's totally different. They had the little office.
Now I hear the facilities are off the charts. Good for him. He has built a heck of a program there. He is, like I said,
one of the guys that I respect most in this profession.
Q. Greg, we spoke a lot last season about how because it was so strange and needing to adjust quickly and pivot.
How much do you feel like that prepared you guys for this current situation of just being ready to go as soon as
you needed to?
GREG SCHIANO: Great question, Chris, and that's something that Julius referred to. We were one of two teams, I
believe, in the Big Ten Conference that played every game on our schedule. That didn't happen by accident.
These guys were unbelievable in what they sacrificed to make sure we could play, so that gave me great
confidence that if they wanted to do this like they wanted to do that, we would be able to get ready and get
mobilized. Now, I understand the disadvantages. We have a group that's been preparing and in football shape
and all those things, but as I told our guys, who cares? Right? We'll get it as good as we can, and then let's go out
and figure it out. We'll figure it out on Friday. I think these guys are ready to figure it out.
Q. Adam, this is for you. Could you talk a little bit about your schedule? I was at practice yesterday, and you said you were in Australia and just what it took to get you here. And then, also, you're staying where the Players Championship is, and I heard you say you stay up until 3:00 a.m. to watch that every year. Can you talk about that as well?
ADAM KORSAK: To answer that last question, this morning I got on the 17 green, and I'm still on a buzz from that because of how good that hole is. About six or seven days ago I was back in Australia, and I went through LAX, and I saw a rumor on Twitter. Get on the plane, arrive in Sydney, get through customs and all that. Turn on my Wifi, and my phone starts lighting up. Like, come back, come back. It's not that easy, guys. Three days of quarantine, two negative tests, and then the next day negative again. Back on the plane. It's a lot of flying, but, obviously, it's worth it.
The great thing is I was able to stay punting, and I was able to work with Billy Taylor, who is a great long snapper, who is in a Senior Bowl, so we were working almost every day in our indoor facility, and then got a chance to have a few punts in Australia as well. Yeah, I feel great, and it's great to be here, and it's a tremendous opportunity.
GREG SCHIANO: He loves golf so much. I do bed check the night before games, and he is the only player in all my career that when I go in, he is watching the Golf Channel. (Laughing)
Q. Hit the green on 17?
ADAM KORSAK: I don't think I would hit the green. I would probably put it straight in the pond, but it was just great to be out there.
(Laughing)
Q. I know a lot of fans are curious how much you'll be able to play young guys. Especially Gavin Wimsatt. He has one more game of eligibility. Is he in your plan to get him out there?
GREG SCHIANO: We're going to do, Steve, whatever gives us the best chance to win because I promised these guys that we're coming down, we're letting it hang out. Is Gavin part of that? Certainly. We're going to play a ton of guys because we have to. It's going to be 80 degrees. We left New Jersey, I think it was 34. We hadn't practiced. We had two practices in the bubble. We tried to turn the heat up a little bit, but we're going to play everybody that we think can help us win the game, and Gavin can help us win the game.
Q. Just as a follow-up, besides the reward for the players, what is the single most important thing for the bowl game? Is it recruiting exposure? Is it showing the program to high school players? What would be it beyond that?
GREG SCHIANO: I think it is a reward for the players. That's the, by far, so it's not 1 and 1A. It's 2s down here, but it is that the program put itself in a position to do it. And why? Because the academic work that these guys did. We didn't win enough games to be bowl-eligible, and we own that. What we need to know is the work they did in the classroom is what allowed them to be first up when an opportunity opened, so I tell them all the time. There are no coincidences. We talk a lot about you reap what you sew.
Q. Being from New Jersey, I know my parents were following along diligently with all the reports that you guys were struggling to find an airplane. Can you kind of walk us through when you guys knew you would have a plane?
GREG SCHIANO: That's a great story. We always do this, right? Our theory is you divide and conquer. Everybody has a job. Go do it. Because our defensive coordinator left, my job kind of got harder, so I literally would see Will Gilkison, who really runs the program. I don't know what his title is. Senior something something something. He runs everything, and I would be walking past him in the hall. "Got one; got one." Then he would come back after the next meeting. "Ah, they canceled. We can't do it." It wasn't, obviously, the planes. It was crew. It was staffing the planes. Finally, we found one. We had to go on two different planes, so myself and a couple of guys and then the whole squad of players, we came down from Newark, but the rest of the staff came down. We had to drive up to White Plains to get the plane, and then we sat on the runway for two and a half hours in Newark, and that was interesting. The kids were great, though. They just kind of did their thing. Literally when the wheels got off the ground, I looked at Gilkison sitting next to me. I said: "All right, this is official. We're going." I didn't know if we would. There was a lot of funny suggestions, like, well, you can take a train. One guy wanted -- why don't we get a cruise ship and take it -- I said, we'll do all those things. You got it.
Q. Love it. Then, also, if you could just describe the emotions for you. Not only having coached in Tampa and also recruited this area so heavily during your first tenure at Rutgers, the emotions for you coming here to Northeast Florida.
GREG SCHIANO: I check the weather right away. I love Florida. I think it's a great place, and I told these guys right away. I said, it's going to be in the 70s all week, and they've had a chance to enjoy it. I have not seen it, but my wife told me there was a bunch of guys at the pool and having fun. That to me is what it's about. It's a reward. I'm thrilled for them.
Q. (Off microphone)
NOAH VEDRAL: Wake has a great offense. They have a great team. They're 17th in the country. They deserve a lot of respect, and our coaches put together a really, really good game plan to take advantage of some of things we've seen on tape, and we've been really working hard this week to kind of knock some of the rust off, but at the same time being aggressive and being confident in what we do. We have a lot of banked reps this season, and we're going to rely on that. We're going to use that to carry us through a lot of the game, and we're going to try to maximize our opportunities while minimizing our risks.
Q. Going back to the rust part of things, as quarterback, the most rhythmic position on the field. What's it like spending almost a month off of football -- I mean, still working out, but getting back in the rhythm of things. How do you expect to go back out there tomorrow?
NOAH VEDRAL: From a physical standpoint, I can speak for a lot of our team, we feel good and rested and we're excited to play. I would say the thing I was most stressed about was reading signals. It's a language you speak, and when you don't speak it for a little bit, it gets rusty. The good news is that one comes back probably faster than anything. Other than that, I wouldn't say we're very rusty at all at this point. Feeling really good.
Q. Coach, I know Pitt and Rutgers haven't always been the best of friends, but in the ACC Championship game they really helped kind of expose some flaws, I guess, for Wake. Have you modelled the game plan after what they did?
GREG SCHIANO: I think it's hard. Sometimes people say, well, just do what they did. If that's not in your system, it's not the easiest thing to do. That's why you break down multiple opponents, and that's why time is a nice thing to have when you are getting ready. A regular preparation for a football game, our young coaches are always a week ahead, so you have the stuff done. When you get on the plane or you go to your hotel at home, the whole breakdown is done except one game, the game that your future opponent is going to play the same day you're playing. We had none of that. What we just tried to do was get as many -- as soon as we thought we
might go, I told our young guys, I said, you've got to break down these games. I said, I got to be honest, we may not use any of it, but it's not going to hurt you. It's going to make you a better coach because this is a really good team, and you'll learn some things. I think they were probably as happy as anybody that all their work got to be used, but you can't really copy something that you don't do. You could, but I don't know how good you would get. Noah used a term that we're very fond of, "banked reps." Cumulative repetitions. Football is a game of repetition. The more you do something and it becomes second nature, you can do it under stress. When you make the changes, there are coaches and teams that do it. We haven't figured out how to do that.
Q. Julius, I think this will be your 58th game. A career record that will never be broken unless there's another pandemic that we don't know about all the time and they give a sixth year senior another year of eligibility. Can you put in perspective just how you've been able to play every week, week in, week out. And I guess as a follow-up to Greg, as a guy who has seen a lot of football, how impressive is it for nose tackle to do it, to play 58 games in a row?
JULIUS TURNER: Basically, it's really just staying in the treatment room. Just being able to get my body right, but honestly, I think I'm blessed. I'm a big believer in God, so I think I'm blessed. We were on the way here. Adam was talking to me and said, we go to a bowl game, I'm going to break your record, right? I'm, like, what? I had to look it up and count his games. It might get broke next year if they go to a bowl game. I'm just blessed to be here.
GREG SCHIANO: It's a great point, Keith. The position that Julius plays I would say 80% of the time every play you at least start by getting blocked by two people. To stay healthy that many games and to be able to show up each week, and I can promise I say stay healthy, this guy is a tough guy. He has played with a lot of pain because of the love he has for his teammates and our program, so that doesn't go missed by me. We're very appreciative of the toughness that he has displayed every week.
DAVE CLAWSON: First off, thanks to all of you for being here and covering Wake Forest Football and the TaxSlayer Gator Bowl. We're honored to be here. We're extremely proud of our football program. We had a great season. We had tremendous buy-in from our football team and just had a great year, and these guys have worked incredibly hard to get to ten wins, to win the ACC Atlantic Title. The first team since Florida State and Clemson to do that in about 15 years. To play in an ACC Championship game and to have a chance to achieve an 11th win, which has only been done one other time in school history. So we're proud of our season and thrilled that we have one more opportunity to play a football game together.
I really want to thank the Gator Bowl committee, the Chairman and our hosts and everybody associated with it. This has not been a normal year for bowl games. When we won a tenth game against BC, one of the things we were excited about is, guys, we're probably going to be now in a Florida bowl. When we got the invite to the Gator Bowl, our guys were fired up. We have a lot of players from the State of Florida, and we were really excited to play the one team in the country that beat Alabama, and Texas A&M has a great program and a great team. And then when COVID hit, it felt like 2020 again.
We really appreciate how aggressively the Gator Bowl fought to keep the game going. Our players, we met with them when Texas A&M canceled. And they said that we want to play a game, but we want to play in the Gator Bowl in Jacksonville, Florida. We don't want to go anywhere else. This was a reward for a great season, and if we're not going to play in the Gator Bowl, then if we finish 10-3, so be it, but we want to play in the Gator Bowl. What they put out was, as they said, appropriately so, was a very aggressive want ad. Then it became a matter of a 5-7 APR team or maybe a team in a second bowl, and I give Rutgers and Greg Schiano a ton of credit. I think it speaks volumes of the job that he has already done there that you had a bunch of 5-7 teams with good APR scores that essentially said, no, we don't want to play in the game, and if Rutgers had turned it down, I'm not sure if we would have played. Maybe we would have ended up against another Big Ten team, but the fact that Rutgers wanted to play in the game and made great efforts to do so, I think speaks volumes about what Greg is building at Rutgers.
They had a great season. This is only the first time since 2014 they've won five games. If you look at the three best divisions -- not conferences -- the three best divisions in college football, whether it's the SEC West, Big Ten East, or ACC Atlantic, we play in one of those divisions, and Rutgers plays in another one of them. They've played a playoff team in Michigan. They have played a top ten team in Ohio State. They've played a top ten team in Michigan State. They've played a very good Penn State program. If you watch what Maryland did yesterday, there's a lot of really good football teams.
I know Greg. I've known him for over 30 years. He would not have taken this game if he didn't believe he was going to win it. This is going to be a very competitive, very hard-fought football game against a really good football
team in the Big Ten East. Again, people will look at the record. You've got to look at the schedule, and there's a lot of good football teams with winning records. If they played Rutgers' schedule, it would look differently.
Again, we're thrilled to be here. We're excited for a competitive contest, and we just want to thank the Gator Bowl committee for inviting us and finding a way to save the game. The City of Jacksonville, the people at the Omni for doing just such a phenomenal job of hosting us. Obviously, Mother Nature has cooperated this year, and we're grateful to her as well.
Q. Dave, your relationship with Greg, you mentioned 30 years. Can you pinpoint an origin of how you guys met and then how the relationship has evolved over those 30 years?
DAVE CLAWSON: Greg had a fraternity brother and a teammate of his at Bucknell by the name of Ed Foley, who I'm very good friends with, and Greg is a year older than me, but I got to know Greg through Ed. Then when I went to the University of Buffalo, the person I shared an office with GA'ed with Greg at Rutgers. It was 1990, 1991, and Greg was a secondary GA at Penn State, and I was the secondary coach at Buffalo, and I went down to visit Greg and learn secondary play.
Then as his career went from Penn State to the Chicago Bears to the Miami Hurricanes, I got named the head coach at Fordham in 1999. Greg got named at head coach at Rutgers in 2000. I think we were the two youngest head coaches in the country. Obviously, Greg was at a Power Five level, and I was at an FCS level. I used to go over and visit with him all the time, and we both were trying to rebuild programs that had not had success, and we stayed in touch.
When he got the head job at Tampa Bay, I used to go down and visit him every year for not training camp, but for OTAs, and he would give me access to his team meetings, staff meetings, any meeting I wanted to. And then Greg's first year that he was not with Tampa, he came up and spent two or three days with us at training camp at Wake Forest, and I asked him to do an assessment of our whole program. Where he thought we were good. I asked him to evaluate coaches. He had a three or four page report that was really helpful, so I think we're both grinders. We don't talk to a lot of other coaches during the season. When I'm dealing with a head coaching issue, Greg is certainly a guy I reach out to, and he has reached out it me as well.
I think he is one of the best coaches in all of college football. He is one of the smartest, brightest coaches I've ever met, and I just have a ton of respect for him. And, again, I know how competitive he is, and I know that he wouldn't have said, hey, we're in if he didn't already study our film and say, we can beat these guys. He is a competitor.
Q. We've talked a lot about the challenges Rutgers had getting here and logistically getting the team back together, all of that. I'm just curious from your standpoint, you were preparing for one team. Completely different opponent. Even their personnel. You probably are not even certain who might be playing in this game for them. I'm curious the change in opponents, how has that affected you?
DAVE CLAWSON: Instead of making it a bowl experience for our staff, it's made it more like a regular season game. One of the great things about bowl games is you can break down the whole season of 12 games, and you can take your time. It's usually over the holidays, so you try to create a schedule that the bowl game is a reward not just for the players, but the staff. We had it all set up that our staff would be home Christmas Eve at 7:00 to have dinner with their family. We were going to work five or six hours on Christmas, and then the game switched, and then it became a normal week. Christmas Eve became a 12-hour day. We worked 14 hours on Christmas because it became like a typical Monday-Tuesday before a game, so for the players I don't think the experience was that different. The impact was really on the coaches. As you spent 80-some hours getting ready for Texas A&M and then a week before -- and that's normal. Usually, you have a week to prepare for an opponent. It just made it from a bowl experience to kind of a regular season preparation.
Q. This is a question for Ja'Sir Taylor. Two key themes of this team are "1-0 every week" and then "good to great." Describe to us how you've been able to maintain that mentality, especially as we've noted with the recent change in opponent, the health landscape, things along those lines?
JA'SIR TAYLOR: As Coach said, I don't think the opponent change really affected us that much. It just changed it to a normal week preparing for a team. Then going 1-0, that's something we preach in our locker room and our meetings each week. It's very hard sometimes to do that, but when you go into the team meeting room, connect with your guys and just focus on the task at hand, it kind of gets easier.
Q. Sam, before they changed opponents, in one of the early news conferences Jimbo Fisher talked about how difficult Wake was going to be to defend and that you did some things that other teams did offensively, but you block it a little bit differently, and he said there were some challenges. What is it, do you think, about your offense that puts so much stress on other defenses?
SAM HARTMAN: I think the biggest thing is we've got playmakers everywhere, and every play can be an explosive play. Shout out to Coach. He puts us in situations where we can be successful in first down, second down, third down. I mean, yeah, we do things differently, but it's all the same. Ball goes forward, and we try and get first downs and get touchdowns. I think it's just the explosiveness on every play that is probably the biggest challenge to defend.
Q. (Off microphone)
SAM HARTMAN: That's about it. There's explosive plays, possibility at all times, and it keeps defenders on their toes.
Q. Sam, can you touch a little bit on the benefits of having an extra game after the ACC Championship game versus last year where it kind of felt like you got to stew on the bowl game against Wisconsin for an entire year and now you get another chance to get back out there?
SAM HARTMAN: Yeah, it's nice to get another crack at it. For the seniors, I think about them. I felt like I carried that one after Wisconsin for a while just knowing that a lot of guys' last games went out like that, but I was happy for the seniors, like Luke, Chap, Ja, Miles that they get a chance to go out on top is probably the biggest thing.
Q. If any of the seniors want to take this one. Just describe the ascension of Wake Forest over the last few years. I know Dave mentioned that it's the first time a non Clemson, Florida State name has won your division. What has this year meant to you and your dedication to this program?
SAM HARTMAN: I touched on this. We all have senior talks, and I think I touched a little bit on this in my senior talk. I think when we set that motto to go from good to great this year, it was a really aggressive motto. It wasn't something that we've done in the past, and I think when we put that out there, the whole ACC looked at that, and if we didn't accomplish going from good to great, it would have looked pretty stupid. I think just the complete buy-in from everything, from winter workouts to spring football to summer workouts and into camp, it was the best that I've ever been a part of at Wake.
The seniors obviously helped lead that, but even the scout team. The scout team was the best scout team that I've ever seen, and we had complete buy-in from the whole program. And I think if you are going to accomplish something that we wanted to accomplish, you have to have that. It was really a team effort, and I think everybody completely bought in from the start to finish.
MILES FOX: Kind of piggybacking off that. I haven't been here as long as everybody else up here, but since I've been here in 2019, I've noticed the culture is just different. Saturday mornings, the whole team is in the indoor working out. Coaches aren't there. Then going from there, and it's getting better every single year. It's just been something very special to be a part of.
Q. Miles, with the departure of Lyle Hemphill to Duke, obviously, things have gotten shifted around with who is calling plays, coaching adjustments, et cetera. How do you feel like the guys have handled the departure/moving to this different sort of system and playcalling going to the game?
MILES FOX: Coach Hemphill did a great job. We're all going to miss him. All the other defensive coaches have done a good job game planning, not skipping a beat. We're really confident on how we're going to do. We're fine.
Q. Dave, I know your offensive coordinator is from New Jersey, and you have some -- you have talked about Fordham, and you have a lot of Northeast roots. Can you talk about your philosophy recruiting New Jersey. Can you just talk about how you've made New Jersey an emphasis?
DAVE CLAWSON: I always joke that the heart and soul of our program is probably going to usually come from within the five hours of Wake Forest. So if you look at our roster, it's predominantly North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia. Jacksonville has been a great, great city to the Demon Deacons. From Riley Skinner to John Wolford and Ryan Smenda and Je'Vionte Nash, it's been a really good area. Sometimes the arms and legs can come from anywhere, and we will leave our little five-hour circle to get a player that we think fits our school, fits our culture, and can make a difference in our program.
With Ja'Sir, he was kind of a late addition. It looked like he was going to Temple, and we needed a defensive back, and his film just popped out when we watched it, and we flew up to New Jersey and spent time with him and had him visit. I think guys like Ja'Sir and Luke and Chap and the other guys up here kind of epitomize our program. A lot of players we take maybe flew a little bit under the radar in terms of recruiting rankings, but they had intangible skills, a work ethic, a love of football, and to me they're as good as a lot of the four and five star guys we play against two or three, four years later. These guys up here with me right now, they can play anywhere in the country. We go after guys that we think that their best years are ahead of them, and there's no question with Ja'Sir, we thought a couple of years in the weight room and he had the right makeup to become an elite corner in the ACC, and almost all these guys up here proved us right.
Q. Dave, you touched a bit on recruiting. With the State of Florida, you have Luke up there, himself from the State of Florida. How important is it this game and having this sort of spotlight on Wake Forest going to envision helping recruiting when you are going against Georgia, Florida, Alabama, all these schools?
DAVE CLAWSON: I don't know how many recruits we're going to beat on Alabama because we're in the Gator Bowl, but I think the ten wins, obviously, 11 would make it even more elite. I think there's right now 14 or 15 Power Five schools in the country that have double-digit wins, and we're one of them. The facilities we've built have helped, but this is all you don't go from the bottom to the top. There's a ton of incremental steps that you take to go from noncompetitive to competitive, to average, to above average, to being a great football team, and we don't want to just be a great football team. We want to be a great football program. Great football programs find themselves in this position maybe not every year, but consistently. All of these and getting to a tier one bowl like the Gator Bowl only helps us moving forward with recruits. We had 12 commitments this year, and some of those schools that you talk about, the very, very elite in college football, came in on some of these players late, and if we don't win ten games, don't get to an ACC Championship game, don't get a Gator Bowl bid, maybe they feel that they should go somewhere else and play big-time football. And now they realize, no, Wake Forest is playing big-time football. These guys helped establish that, and now it's our job to keep that momentum going so that "good to great" doesn't become a one-season theme but a program theme.
Q. I have several people texting me asking. I know it's kind of warm in Carolina right now, but, Luke, especially now knowing you're from Florida, are you guys enjoying the Omni? What's the go-to hang-out right now?
LUKE MASTERSON: It's been awesome. We've been lucky to have really good weather too. Sometimes this time of year it's been cold and rainy. We've been lucky to have some sun. We've all been hanging out at the pool a little bit. The hot tub has been a big place to hang out after practice and stuff. Just being out at practice too, feeling the heat, guys getting a little crop-top action on the shirts and just enjoying it.
(Laughing)
Q. How is the hair holding up, Sam?
SAM HARTMAN: I don't know. You tell me.
(Laughing)
Follow Chris Nalwasky on Twitter @ChrisNalwasky.
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