‘We were skunked’: Revisiting ‘WakeyLeaks’, one of CFB’s most bizarre scandals , #skunked #Revisiting #WakeyLeaks #CFBs #bizarre #scandals Welcome to O L A S M E D I A TV N E W S, This is what we have for you today:
By Bruce Feldman, Matt Fortuna and Jayson Jenks
In November 2016, Ryan Anderson watched as one of Wake Forest’s coaches diagrammed a play on the whiteboard: a wide receiver screen in the flat. But there was a twist. Instead of three receivers split out to block, there would be three offensive linemen, including Anderson, Wake’s starting right tackle.
“You’re always in the trenches,” Anderson says. “To get out there near some of the pencil necks — linemen have a bunch of funny words for DBs — that’s the lineman’s dream.”
After the meeting, Anderson and the rest of the line retreated to their position room. “We were all going over how to line up like a receiver, which foot to have back, how to stand,” Anderson says. “No one had ever played receiver.”
Four days later, Wake Forest would play on the road against Lamar Jackson and the No. 6 Louisville Cardinals. A former Wake staffer said coaches wanted to keep players engaged late in the season, so the Demon Deacons installed about eight new and trick plays, including the three-linemen look and a double-pass to the tight end.
Anderson and the linemen took their roles seriously, drilling the new wrinkle day after day. “It was such a crazy, weird, diabolic play,” he says. The play was so new, in fact, that Wake offensive coordinator Warren Ruggiero didn’t have old film to show his players how it should look; Ruggiero had never run it in more than 20 years of coaching.
Before the game, one of Wake’s equipment managers found a black binder sitting prominently atop a trash can inside Louisville’s stadium. The binder didn’t raise immediate red flags among the equipment staff; it’s not uncommon for teams to leave behind fake plays as a decoy. But just hours before kickoff, Wake’s coaches and players were stunned when they opened the binder for the first time and saw the trick play inside.
“Immediately we knew,” Anderson says. “They had stolen our plays.”
Wake Forest had an 11-win season and a No. 15 finish in the AP poll in 2021, both program-bests. But in 2014 and 2015, during arguably the apex of ACC football, coach Dave Clawson and the Deacons had one conference win apiece in Clawson’s first two seasons. Fortunes reversed during that 2016 season, when the Deacons went 7-6, capped by their first bowl win in eight seasons.
But as it turned out, the smallest Power 5 school in the country had played with one arm tied behind its back, in a scandal that came to be known as “WakeyLeaks.”
“It was really f—-d up and it went on for so long,” a Wake Forest assistant says. “If this involved Clemson or someplace like that, this would’ve been the biggest deal of all time — all of college football would’ve been paused to figure out what was going on.”
A’Lique Terry couldn’t believe what happened.
Wake Forest had installed a new play before a September 2014 game against Louisville that called for the quarterback to run a speed option with the running back to one side, while simultaneously, a receiver would peel back across the line for a misdirection shovel pass.
“We had never run that play, ever,” Anderson says.
During the game, Terry squared off against Sheldon Rankins, a future first-round defensive tackle and one of the toughest assignments Terry drew in his career. Late in the third quarter, with Wake Forest leading 10-7, Ruggiero decided it was time for the new play — Terry thinks the play call had “chuck” in the name — and quarterback John Wolford yelled it at the line.
Terry says Rankins took a knee and hollered, “Shovel pass is coming! Shovel pass is coming!” Terry was stunned. “I had Sheldon Rankins that play — I had to block him,” Terry says. “So when he said that, it’s like going into war and someone knowing where your bunker is. What the hell do I do?”
Just a true freshman, Terry wondered: “Can I call a timeout right now and still be on scholarship?”
He decided to snap the ball. Rankins blew past Terry’s right shoulder, ignoring Wolford and the running back headed left. Rankins settled in front of the receiver peeling back and picked off the shovel pass as if he was the target all along.
Louisville scored a touchdown a few plays later and held on for a 20-10 win.
Terry always believed he was a smart player. He wasn’t the biggest, and couldn’t dominate simply with raw power and force, so he had to be more prepared than his opponent. The son of a longtime high school coach, Terry started watching film when he was in sixth grade, and he knew it was the reason he was at Wake Forest.
“It wasn’t because of my skill set,” he says. “It was because of my football IQ. That was always how I gave myself an advantage.”
That’s what made the play against Louisville so jarring. Terry didn’t know how to process what had happened. “Maybe I’m not doing enough,” he thought. “Maybe I don’t know enough.”
Later that season, Wake Forest played Virginia Tech in a touchdown-less game infamous for the Frank Beamer meme it spawned. But Tyler Hayworth, a guard at Wake Forest, remembers that day for different reasons.
It was the strangest sensation, he says. The Demon Deacons would call a play at the line and Virginia Tech’s defense would counter with the perfect check or the perfect blitz, seemingly always one step ahead. After another stalled drive, Hayworth walked off the field in frustration.
“They know what the hell we’re doing!” he said on the sideline. “They know everything we’re doing as we’re doing it!”
Other players echoed Hayworth during the game. Receivers came back to the sideline, saying, “Hey, Coach, they’re calling out our routes before the play. They know what we’re running!”
But Wake’s coaches dismissed the complaints.
“We were like, ‘Yeah, whatever, that’s definitely not the case,’” a former Wake staffer says.
But the eerie sensation remained for Hayworth and his teammates. Over the next two years, in conversations among themselves, players would joke about it: the feeling that defenses knew what they were going to do before they did it. Even Ruggiero was known around the football office to say it felt like certain teams knew his plays.
“Do people think I’m crazy?” he would ask.
“We might have been skunked.”
That’s what a coach told Anderson and the offensive line in 2016, less than 30 minutes before kickoff at Louisville.
In a moment of chaos, coaches huddled in the back of the locker room. Anderson and players waited in full pads, having finished their pregame routine. The black binder had been brought to the coaching staff’s attention. Inside were play cards diagrammed with Wake’s new trick plays. The assistant coach told Anderson and the offensive line they might not run the trick play they had practiced all week.
“I was devastated,” Anderson says.
Wake’s coaches changed everything: who signaled in signs, what those signs meant — something that never happens so close to kickoff. Clawson wanted to test the binder’s authenticity, so with 12:19 left in the first quarter, he called a tight end double-pass to Cam Serigne, which had appeared on one of the binder’s play cards, scribbled in silver Sharpie, with Serigne’s No. 85 written next to it.
Serigne was supposed to block for two or three seconds, then break out and catch a pass. Right when he was about to slip out, he lifted his head.
“The entire defense is literally all staring at me,” Serigne says. “It was crazy.”
On the Wake radio broadcast, play-by-play man Stan Cotten described the play for listeners: “Wake to the line, second down-and-8 at the Louisville 13. From the pistol, rolling right with the ball is Wolford. Wants to throw, being pursued from behind, throws the ball downfield and out of bounds…”
“Yeah, that’s the tight end delay play,” color analyst Tommy Elrod interjected. “They actually took Cam Serigne, had him delay on the line of scrimmage. Louisville was all over it.”
Receiver Cortez Lewis couldn’t comprehend any of it. Every time he ran a route, it seemed as if a defensive back was waiting for him. “Exactly where I was supposed to stop at,” Lewis says, “you’ve got a corner or safety sitting right there.” Defensive lineman Josh Banks says players asked Clawson: “Are we playing against your big brother or something? Because they’re calling perfect calls — like perfect calls — for everything we’re doing.”
Lamar Jackson would win the Heisman that year, but heading into the fourth quarter, it was Wake, not Louisville, with the 12-10 lead. “We were in it,” Hayworth says. “We had a chance to win.”
Louisville turned the final score into a deceiving 44-12 blowout, but Wake’s players experienced at least a measure of consolation. After the game, Serigne and several teammates sat around and connected the dots over the years. “All those times where we thought we were crazy,” he said, “maybe we weren’t.”
But that only led to another question: How did Louisville get Wake Forest’s plays?
The next day, Clawson stood in front of his players.
There had been a security breach, he told them. He ordered players to change their passwords, coaches to turn in their phones and warned everyone, according to one player, “not to lie to him because he would find out the truth.”
Most troubling of all, he implied that the breach had come from within the program.
“We were skunked,” he said.
Clawson was in his third season after taking over for longtime coach Jim Grobe. His first two teams had shown pluck, but both seasons ended in 3-9 records.
He tried to limit the distraction, rarely talking about the leak, even once the story broke four days after the Louisville game. Still, a sense of paranoia set in. Some players were hesitant to watch film inside the building for fear they might become suspects. “Believe me,” one staffer says, “everybody was a suspect at the time.” Another staffer was spooked by the sound of shutting doors, an audible reminder of all the meetings taking place.
“You sat there and knew you didn’t do anything wrong,” the staffer says. “But then you start thinking, ‘Did I say something that somebody was able to take advantage of?’”
After spending the evening with the Wake broadcast crew, Tommy Elrod texted Lonnie Galloway the night before the Louisville game. The two had worked together at Wake Forest for two seasons under Grobe. Elrod, a former longtime Wake assistant coach, was now the team’s color commentator on the school’s radio broadcast; Galloway was the receivers coach and co-offensive coordinator at Louisville. It was a crisp fall evening, with a gentle breeze and passing clouds.
“On way now,” Elrod wrote.
“OK,” Galloway texted back. “Sitting by fire pit.”
Elrod came to Wake Forest in 1993 as a walk-on quarterback from Florida; his dad, Tom, was a marketing executive at The Walt Disney Company credited with the “I’m going to Disney World!” ad campaign. Post graduation, Elrod spent two years as a business analyst for a bank in Charlotte before returning to Wake Forest as a graduate assistant. When Grobe hired him as a full-time coach in 2003, he called it an “easy decision.”
“He’s very loyal,” Grobe said at the time. “He loves Wake Forest.”
Elrod had been a well-liked assistant who players described as mellow, cerebral and quiet. “He was awesome,” Hayworth says. “He was awesome to be around as a coach.” One former Wake player who played for Elrod when he was on the coaching staff says that “nobody in the building ever had a bad word to say about him.”
But as the “WakeyLeaks” scandal deepened, there were two conflicting narratives developing around Elrod.
The first worked in his favor: He was a Wake Forest lifer. “You couldn’t find someone more of a Demon Deacon than him,” Serigne says.
The second did not: He had a clear motive.
What exactly Elrod and Galloway discussed around the fire pit is unclear. But over the coming days, the mystery began to unravel.
Wake Forest hired an investigative firm to dig into the leak. The firm uncovered oddities in Elrod’s computer habits. Like many team color commentators, he had access to Wake’s practice tape to prepare for that week’s game. But a source said investigators found that Elrod logged in at strange hours.
There were records of phone calls to opposing coaches: a 25-minute call with Galloway the Wednesday before the Louisville game; another with Shane Beamer, then an assistant at Virginia Tech, the night before Wake played the Hokies in 2014.
There were records of emails and faxes, according to sources, including a lengthy one to Jay Bateman, another former Wake coach who was then the defensive coordinator at Army. Elrod, according to a source, diagrammed Wake’s plays and sent them off to opposing coaches.
It’s still unclear how the binder ended up on top of the trash can for the Deacons to find. But Wake Forest did determine that Elrod leaked information to three schools dating back to Clawson’s first season in 2014: Virginia Tech, Army and Louisville. Many players and some coaches believe more schools were involved. Galloway and Bateman either declined or did not respond to requests for comment from The Athletic.
The impact of the scandal is still a topic of debate. Wolford was sacked seven times and suffered a shoulder injury in that 2016 Louisville game. Days after news broke about Elrod’s involvement, Wolford’s father, Robert, told USA Today the scandal had “put John potentially in danger of getting hurt.” Three years earlier, Elrod had recruited Wolford to Wake Forest.
The before-and-after numbers are suggestive. In 2016, Wake scored 20.4 points per game, which ranked 119th out of 128 teams. The next season, with virtually the same players back, the Demon Deacons averaged 35.3 points, 21st in the country. Against Louisville in 2016, they scored 12 points. In 2017, they scored 42. In 2018, they put up 56.
“Is it a coincidence or not?” Serigne says. “I don’t know.”
Elrod (left) in 2010. Photo: Brian A. Westerholt / Getty
The irony of WakeyLeaks is that it sparked Wake Forest to unprecedented success.
Ruggiero, the offensive coordinator whose handiwork was victimized, brainstormed a new scheme now known as the “Slow Mesh,” a fast-paced option attack combined with the run-pass option (RPO). In the three seasons before Ruggiero developed the Slow Mesh, Wake averaged 17 points. In the five seasons since, the Demon Deacons are averaging 36 points.
Every innovation gets copied, but no one else in college football runs anything like the Slow Mesh. Rival coaches have tried unsuccessfully to reverse engineer Wake’s offense. “Nobody quite knows our rules,” Clawson told The Athletic in May, because the program has become so tight-lipped. “We don’t share. Before WakeyLeaks, I was probably as open as any coach in the country.”
Clawson previously said he struggles being so guarded, but, “I saw that hurt our kids and cost us games. It wasn’t worth it. Go back and watch some of those films after it happened, it was more than got out there.”
Just about everyone interviewed agreed on Elrod’s motive: Revenge. When Clawson replaced Grobe ahead of the 2014 season, he didn’t retain Elrod. But no one knows for sure. Elrod has never publicly spoken about the scandal and declined comment to The Athletic. The coaches who were found to have received information from him are all still coaching college football.
As for Elrod, he still lives in Winston-Salem but is banned from Wake Forest’s campus and football games.
(Illustration: John Bradford / The Athletic; Photo: Mike Comer / Getty)