WINSTON-SALEM — When they got together for position group meetings this week, Wake Forest defensive backs didn’t need to look far to dissect what went wrong against top-ranked Clemson in the season opener.
That much became clear as the video rolled, showing Clemson receivers running free for touchdowns.
“After watching the film, we saw that we left a lot of plays out there,” cornerback Ja’Sir Taylor said. “I would say about 24 points off Clemson walk-ins and due to miscommunication by us, with the signals and communicating the calls. We were playing one defense on one side and another one on the other side which leads to easy touchdowns.”
The focus quickly shifted to shoring up those concerns ahead of the Demon Deacons’ first road game of the season Saturday night at North Carolina State.
“We just met as a defense in the team room and we just really tried to get to the bottom of it,” Taylor said. “We're not trying to point fingers. So we put up the plays where we had miscommunications and the coaches are asking, ‘What are we doing wrong? What happened here?’ It’s not pointing a finger at who's wrong. We're just really trying to get to the bottom of it as a team and solve it.”
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The challenge of playing the top-ranked team in the country became greater for Wake Forest the closer the football season came to kicking off. Due to coronavirus contact tracing and an injury the week of the game, the Demon Deacons were without six defensive backs against Clemson.
“We have players who were never sick, that felt fine, didn't have anything,” Wake Forest coach Dave Clawson said. “But they were out for two weeks, and then they didn't get enough practice in to be cleared to be able to play. You're quarantined for two weeks, it’s not like you can get out of bed and suddenly play a football game in the ACC. We'll get a couple of those guys back this week, so our depth will be better.”
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“We had some miscommunications that cost us deeply,” Clawson said. “You're playing against a high-level opponent, it's tough to execute when you don't get the communication, your strength call correctly, and you let them just walk into the end zone for untouched touchdowns.
“What’s disappointing to me is in some cases we gave up three touchdowns because of a lack of a communication or a call. I hope that those are things that happened because it was under the lights for the first time and we froze up a little bit, but at times we made it too easy and we made it too easy against a team that doesn't need help.”
With the Demon Deacons lacking in numbers, trusted safety Nasir Greer moved to cornerback for the first time in his college career.
“Two days before that, he had never played corner here,” Clawson said. “He's one of our best players and we're glad to get him back, but we were down six corners. That's just one of the things that's going to happen this year is you're going to have guys and have guys and then you're going to find out you don't have guys.
“That was a move out of desperation that Nasir Greer is so smart, knows the defense so well. He's the one guy when all those corners went down that we said could go out there and have an idea what to do. He wasn't perfect, but he held up for the most part, and he always competes, and he's one of our very best football players.”
It wasn’t all bad news in the defensive backfield. Clawson said he sees growth in the position’s depth with so many young players forced into action.
“We played a number of young players, who played a lot of football for us, and we're only going to be better moving forward because of that,” he said. “Whether it was Zion Keith or Peyton Woulard or Nick Andersen or Isaiah Chaney. Just a number of young guys got to play a lot of football for us. We have depth up front, we have depth at linebacker, I think we're starting to build some depth in the secondary.”
Keith led all Atlantic Coast Conference players with 12 tackles last week.
“Zion Keith, against the No. 1 team in the country, played the best game he's ever played,” Clawson said.
This article originally appeared on Times-News: Secondary mishaps emerge among primary concerns for Demon Deacons
