WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. -- When the College Football Playoff selection committee released its first set of rankings two weeks ago, Wake Forest checked in at No. 16. This was below where AP poll voters had the Deacons. It was well below where many advanced metrics pegged Wake, too. The team was 7-1, fresh off four wins against ACC foes by a combined score of 187-31. It seemed like a slap in the face for this season's Cinderella program.
Jake Dickert wasn't surprised.
"People are afraid of what they don't understand," the Wake Forest coach said. "And right now, they don't understand how Wake is doing this. It must be some pixie dust magic or, 'Oh, if they're beating teams like that, those teams must be really bad.'"
This is not a complaint, per se. In fact, it's not even clear that Dickert, who is 17-5 in two years at now-No. 13 Wake, even wants the attention that comes with success. Nor is he particularly interested in educating the world on the Deacons' process. This is a program, after all, whose mantra is "built in the dark." No one is begging for the country to shine a spotlight on Wake to inspect its inner workings. The mystery of just how the smallest school in the Power 4 keeps on winning is a big part of the fun.
It's that word though that rankles folks at Wake Forest. Small.
Wake Forest has an undergraduate enrollment of fewer than 6,000 students, smaller than Vanderbilt, Duke and Northwestern and roughly one-sixth the size of Texas A&M. In a sport in which economies of scale represent the quickest path to success, the Deacons don't look the part.
But the big secret, Dickert said, is that there is no magic spell. Come to Wake Forest's campus. Check out the massive development project happening just outside the stadium. Visit the football facility. Watch a practice. It's not an illusion. Wake is invested in football. It has players who look like their counterparts in the SEC or Big Ten. The roster may not cost $50 million, but nothing about the Deacons' operation feels like it came from the bargain bin.
"What bothers me about 'small' is if people want to impose judgement or limitations about the excellence of our students because they think it's a small place," athletics director John Currie said. "'They can't possibly be good there because they're a small school.' That bothers me because that's just ignorance."
Wake isn't small, Currie said. It's ... personable.
And if that has the ring of a realtor pitching a studio apartment as "cozy" or "quaint," then stick around for the rest of the presentation.
Wake's running a streamlined operation, where the alignment from the president down to the interns working in the weight room functions like the gears in a Rolex, everything precisely coordinated.
Visit the facilities at one of those football factories, and it may be unclear that there's a school nearby. Players spend the day inside a sprawling building, hermetically sealed off from the real world, surrounded by football, football and more football. At Wake, the football building is smack dab in the middle of campus, where football players "go to real classes with real professors, 45 feet from the residence halls and 100 yards from the football facility," Currie said.
"That," Currie said, "is how college is supposed to be."
Then listen to Dickert's recruiting pitch, because he has already done his homework on every player who walks into his office, and he has a plan specially tailored to each one.
"Kids walk away going, 'No one goes into this level. No one shows how the progression plan is going to happen year over year,'" Dickert said. "Everyone just says, 'Hey come in and play.' We have a vision and a plan."
What everyone at Wake has learned by being small -- or, personable -- is that football isn't a one-size-fits-all business.
"Nothing we do is small," Currie said. "This is a big-time place with big-time opportunities."
Wake's investment in football
In his early days, Dickert worked at Minnesota State, where he coached a dominant defense to the Division II national championship game in 2014. Back then, conference rules capped his program's scholarships at 28 -- eight fewer than many other DII schools. Dickert remembers talking with other coaches about how much more the program could do with those extra scholarships, wishing for more. But when the conference lifted the cap a year later, players who had once gotten a 50% share of a scholarship were now getting 75% or 100%, Dickert said, but the talent on the roster didn't really change.
"You had more money," he said, "but you got the same guys."
This is not to suggest Dickert wouldn't like a little more cash to spend on his roster. But he was a math major in college, and his mentor -- former Wyoming coach Craig Bohl -- thinks that has made Dickert particularly good at analyzing and solving problems. And what is roster building with a limited budget other than a math problem?
A year before Dickert's arrival, however, the math simply didn't work. Wake Forest was caught flat-footed when the NIL era began. When star QB Sam Hartman was looking for a payday after leading the Deacons to the 2021 ACC championship game and rewriting the conference record books for passing, Wake didn't have a single dime to give him. There was no collective, and donors who had seen the program succeed on its own merits for so long were reluctant to pony up. Hartman ultimately transferred to Notre Dame. It was a blow to the Deacons' ego.
By December 2024, the financial burden had worn on former coach Dave Clawson, who informed Currie he was contemplating retirement. He hadn't made up his mind, but he told Currie to put out feelers for his next coach. A week later, when Clawson made his decision official, Currie was already hot on Dickert as the ideal replacement.
The financial picture for Wake Forest had changed, too. The House settlement meant schools could directly pay athletes up to $20.5 million, and Wake's board of trustees approved going all-in. Where opponents were routinely spending orders of magnitude more than Wake before, the Deacons could at least be competitive in the NIL space now.
"We're not outspending people," Currie said. "There's a bunch of schools that are above us, and we'll also play a bunch of schools that aren't. There was a significant gap, and we mitigated that with the House case settlement."
What Wake has feels like a windfall compared to Dickert's previous job at Washington State.
Dickert had been the Cougars' defensive coordinator in 2022 when Washington State fired head coach Nick Rolovich and four of his assistants after they refused to comply with a mandate that all state employees be vaccinated against COVID-19. Then-AD Pat Chun offered Dickert the job, but it came with a dire warning.
"The locker room was divided at that point," Chun said, "and I remember telling Jake there was a possibility that we may not win another game. He could go 0-6 and might never be a head coach again in his career."
Dickert wasn't concerned. He loved that team, and he believed his players deserved a chance to finish out the season with a coach who was invested in their success.
The Cougars lost their next game, but won three of four to close out the regular season, including their first Apple Cup victory in nearly a decade. Dickert was hired full time, went to a bowl in 2022 and helped develop future No. 1 draft pick Cam Ward in the process. But then the Pac-12 fell apart, Washington State was left adrift, and the resources dried up. For Dickert, Wake Forest didn't seem like a small, private school on the other side of the country. It looked like an oasis.
Dickert talked to Clawson, who sold him on the idea that Wake could compete in the revenue-sharing era. He sat with his general manager, Rob Schlaeger, and looked at a map. Schools on a budget were bound to be poached of talent, they figured, so sustainability had to come from finding their own talent on the recruiting trail and from FCS and Group of 6 transfers to replenish the roster. They drew a circle that represented a five-hour radius from Winston-Salem, and what they saw was opportunity.
"We were like, 'Holy cow,'" Dickert said, "and then you put our process on top of it -- that's it."
In Dickert's first season at Wake in 2025, the Deacons went from 4-8 to 9-4 with a bowl win over Mississippi State. When it was over, the vultures circled. Wake lost key players to Florida, Texas, Texas Tech and UCLA, but Dickert wasn't worried.
Wake found linebacker Vincent Firenze at Dayton to fill the middle of its defense. It landed Deuce Blades II from FIU to handle cornerback. The O-line features transfers from Oregon State, New Hampshire and Weber State.
And at quarterback, it picked up North Carolina cast-off Gio Lopez, reuniting him with his former offensive coordinator Rob Ezell.
Then Dickert turned to his in-house projects, led by right tackle Aidan Martin, who had arrived as a 220-pound work-in-progress. But after a year in the Deacons' strength and nutrition program, Martin had bulked up to 295. Now the Deacons had a redshirt freshman tackle as good as anyone in the conference.
This, Dickert said, is a reminder of why more money isn't always better.
"We trust our development," Dickert said. "Sometimes our coaches, we need to remind them: Don't panic. We've got 11 months to develop guys. Some places think it's not good enough, so let's go spend all this money. But the kids we've got can be that. We've just got to coach our asses off to get them where they need to be strength and weight and technique-wise. But it will get there."
That's what has happened this season. Lopez has been a revelation, accounting for 24 touchdowns and just one turnover. Undersized speedsters like Carlos Hernandez have become explosive-play machines. Development projects like Martin and receiver Jack Foley have come along quickly. Last year's portal home runs like Dallas Afalava and Langston Hardy have become stars. The pieces all fit.
"Wake has always needed to be a place where the sum has to be more than the individual parts," Clawson said.
That's exactly the math Dickert has figured out.
Sometimes more is just more. Scarcity creates innovation, and with the right people in place, Dickert feels like Wake Forest has all it needs to build a blueprint for something special.
"We're pushing the envelope, and people are finding this new space and energy and dynamic to be pretty cool," he said. "You get a top-30 education. A big part of our team is still old-school, true Wake Forest. ... But you've got to love ball, and we provide all these great resources and watch them flourish in all aspects of their life. Sometimes it takes a little bit for kids to get it -- why is this place special? But it's so amazing when they flourish."
Where does Wake go now?
The problem with being the program consistently doing more with less is that, eventually, the schools doing less with more are going to show up at your doorstep, checkbooks in hand, ready with an offer that may contain a zero or two more than Wake Forest can reasonably afford.
Wake can potentially return 17 of this year's 22 starters for 2027, but that's far from guaranteed.
"We're going to have the most-scouted roster in the country, period," Dickert said.
That included the head coach.
Dickert's name had already been bandied about for open jobs at bigger-budget schools, but this week, the Deacons offered yet another reminder that they're invested in success by inking Dickert to a long-term contract extension.
"I've never had more joy than I have had with this team right now," Dickert said. "It's stressful every day, but I've never trusted a coaching staff, a leadership group, the connection of a team like what we've built here."
Still, Curie knows the drill -- knows that even with Dickert secured, keeping the rest of the band together will require more.
"There's problems with winning, and problems with losing," Currie said. "Winning's better."
It's a mantra Dickert can appreciate, but it also underscores his biggest concern about the future at Wake Forest.
What does a big budget really buy? It's an insurance policy, Dickert said. It means that when there's a hole on the roster, it can be filled, and when there's an injury to a key player, there's a backup who's paid to be ready. They're flying without a net at Wake, so Dickert wonders what it will look like when the program inevitably hits a snag.
"At places like this, it's easy when it's great -- and right now, it's great," Dickert said. "Everyone wants to be a part of great. But can you handle the waves of major college athletics? Can you handle it if you have a little dip? Can you continue to invest and say, hey, we're going to stay investing and pushing. That's the challenge of Wake Forest."
Part of Dickert's new contract is a promise for more resources for assistants and support staff.
Currie has been planning for this eventuality.
In the past fiscal year, Wake's athletics department raised a record $43.7 million in cash, the highest fundraising year in its history and a 32% increase over the previous year.
The school's Excellence Funds, which provide sport-specific resources for recruiting and talent acquisition, grew 68%. And Wake's top donor tier set a new record with 430 members. Meanwhile, the school is in the final stages of development of a 100-acre mixed-use land development project called "The Grounds," that will connect campus with the football stadium and basketball arena, while providing new revenue streams for the school that doesn't rely on donor support.
Will all of that be enough? Enough to keep winning now, to preserve the roster for 2027, to build something even bigger down the road?
If Dickert and the Deacons have proved anything so far, it's that "enough" is a relative term.
"We're going to need to have sacrifices to keep this team and these coaches together," Dickert said. "You just hope they see the value in what we're doing."
The new 24-team playoff means the door is wide-open for Wake Forest to make the postseason, and the ACC is a league Dickert said he loves because "when you do it right, you can win, regardless of who you are."
If his coordinators return for 2027, it'll be Year 3 in the same scheme on both sides of the ball.
If Lopez comes back, Wake will have a genuine Heisman Trophy contender leading the charge.
If the Deacons' players are willing to stay for a little less than what the open market might bear, they'll find a connection and an opportunity in Winston-Salem unlike anywhere else.
That's the vision. Dickert sees it. Wake is having a program-defining season now, but he's just getting started.
"You can see this avalanche that can be formed," he said. "We've got to be all-out sprinting, gas pedal down. That energizes me, and as long as I feel that, I'm good."