NCAA Football wake forest Demon Deacons

It's becoming clear that Florida State's Bobby Bowden, who turn 80 on Sunday, wants to coach the Seminoles in 2010.

The feisty Bowden has tipped his hand many times since coming under fire from high-level boosters, fans and the media following a 2-4 start.

Consecutive victories over North Carolina and North Carolina State have helped quiet restless critics -- and a victory Saturday at Clemson would vault FSU into second place in the ACC Atlantic Division -- and Bowden said Wednesday he will make the final call on who replaces retiring Mickey Andrews as defensive coordinator.

However, Bowden also stressed that head coach-in-waiting Jimbo Fisher will make a strong contribution to the process, so don't expect a disagreement conspiracy between the pair.

A solid rivalry has developed between Boston College and Virginia Tech.

While the Eagles have won the last three regular-season games against the Hokies, Virginia Tech has beaten Boston College when its counted most in the past two ACC Championship games. Plenty is at stake again when the two tangle Saturday in Blacksburg, Va.

"These guys are a premier program in the country and they haven't skipped a beat since the last time we saw them," BC coach Frank Spaziani said.

Tom O'Brien teams traditionally get better as the season goes on -- as North Carolina State did in winning four of its last five games last year. With Wake Forest, Duke and Boston College coming up in the next three weeks, the surging Wolfpack could be 6-1 going into its bye week prior to an Atlantic Division showdown at Florida State.

O'Brien, however, isn't about to get caught up in such nonsense. He's a game-at-a-time head coach, and Saturday's meeting at Wake Forest is N.C. State's first ACC game and first road game.

"All I know is what team I got this week against the team I am going to play," O'Brien said. "I don't know who is going to be here next week. We continue to march on and try to be the best we can weekly."

This was not the way the ACC was hoping to start the 2009 college football season. The conference is still trying to establish that it is on par with the SEC, Big 12 or the Big 10. Instead, it has barely kept itself in front of the Big East. The early returns suggest more of the same this year.

Through the 10 games to start the season, ACC teams went a combined 4-6. That's bad enough, considering that the ACC was a collective 0-4 against teams from the other BCS conferences. With Virginia Tech losing to Alabama in a semi-neutral site, Wake Forest suffering a home loss to Baylor, Cal destroying Maryland, and of course the opening night nationally-broadcast loss by NC State as the harbinger for this lost weekend. When the best win of the weekend is Clemson trouncing a middle-of-the-pack Sun Belt foe in Middle Tennessee State, that is not a good sign.

Riley Skinner enjoyed his summer.

Skinner spent six weeks in his hometown of Jacksonville, Fla., training, golfing and visiting the beach. The veteran quarterback returned to Wake Forest energized -- and with a nice tan -- to help extend the Demon Deacons' school record eight-or-more win bowl seasons to a fourth consecutive year.

After years of relying on defense, Skinner wants to make sure the offense pulls its weight this season.

"We were fairly inconsistent last year with the scheme we had and the way we played each Saturday," said Skinner, the winningest quarterback in Wake Forest history with 26 victories as a starter.

The ACC championship game has seen diminishing attendance from the 70,000 plus in the first game in 2005 down to a dismal sub-28,000 in 2008. The problem, it seems, has not been the fact that the ACC has been a collective morass of mediocrity that makes it less attractive for fans to want to make last-minute travel plans to the game. It has nothing to do with teams with smaller alumni bases like Georgia Tech, Wake Forest and Boston College making appearances.

How about the fact that they have been held in Florida and only once has Florida State or Miami appear? Good luck getting the ACC to admit that was the expectation when they set it up for the first four games to be in Florida.

Most of us dream about going to college and maybe, just maybe, eking things out as a backup QB so you at least have access to whatever choice of coed you want without all the hassle of the pressure, the injuries, etc. Maybe you luck up and become the next Brad Johnson or Matt Cassell. More likely, you parlay that experience into something that will impress at least 95% of the people you meet for the rest of your life.

More like, you just use college as a way to lock down an internship during the summer so you can get that cushy job developing internet security software once you graduate. Looks like Wake Forest's backup QB Brett Hodges managed to live both dreams.

WASHINGTON -- You laugh. Kevin Harris will smile.

Go ahead, chuckle at the notion of a 34th bowl game, the EagleBank Bowl in Washington. Joke that college football needs another bowl like Joe Paterno needs another candle on his birthday cake, like Navy quarterback Kaipo-Noa needs another syllable, or anybody needs another appearance by David Hasselhoff

Go ahead, indulge your cynicism. It's easy. It's like picking on Matt Millen or the French. No one is going to disagree with you. Even NPR got into the act on the opening day of bowls, mocking the EagleBank Bowl in its own cranky "Get off my lawn, kids" way, should you put any stock in the opinions of an outlet with a higher percentage of 60-pluses in its audience than Oklahoma.

But just for a moment, take your cynicism and bury it deep enough that Indiana Jones couldn't find it.

This isn't the NFL, where cynicism is bred on a Terrell Owens' locker room stool, wearing a blinking red nose or Plaxico Burress turning his sweat pants into the Harper's Ferry arsenal.

This is college football, where teams like Wake Forest and Navy are each alloted 85 scholarships, of which the number that will ever make enough to afford one of Terrell Owens' earrings could comfortably fit in a Volkswagen Beetle with room left over for a Owens and Owens' ego.

So go ahead and make your jokes. But all Wake Forest's Kevin Harris can do is smile.

"It's been an unbelievable experience," said Harris, who started the year off the depth chart only to have his nationally televised moment in whatever sun peaked through the clouds at the EagleBank Bowl. "To see the Capitol and all the monuments was great. We were all excited. To have the chance to hang out together for a few more weeks ... we're a tight-knit group and that was great. But most of all, to be able to help give these seniors a win, because they bailed us out so many times, that was the best part."

Harris couldn't stop smiling. Navy coach Ken Niumatalolo, a granite-jawed man who might make the Washington Monument look like it was made out of Jell-O by comparison, had a hard time stopping his tears.

Why? Because whether you can admit it or not, these minor bowls aren't a blight on college football. They're the best part.

WASHINGTON -- Jim Grobe was always certain he could turn Wake Forest, a program that was barely a speed bump on Tobacco Road and little more than road kill on the national scene, into an ACC champion and an elite football program. So, as the coach sat next to the monument-sized trophy for winning the inaugural EagleBank Bowl in Washington, a grin began to form underneath his baseball cap as he admitted something he thought even he'd never thought he'd see.

"I never thought an eight-win season would be a disappointment at Wake Forest," Grobe said.

Congratulations coach, that's the price of building a program. And of being as good as the Demon Deacons were over the final three quarters in the come-from-behind 29-19 win over Navy.

If you needed a sign of just how far Wake Forest football has come under Grobe, who wrapped up his eighth season in Winston-Salem with his third consecutive bowl appearance and second straight bowl win, Saturday's win was the kind of blinking, neon announcement that might've fit in on the Las Vegas Strip.

Despite temperatures that seemed to rival the number of letters in Navy quarterback Kaipo-Noa Kaheaku-Enhada's last name and an early 13-0 deficit, the Deacons won their eighth game for a third straight season, exactly three times as many eight-win seasons as the school had in the pre-Jim Grobe era.

And they did it in what is unmistakeably the Wake Forest way under Grobe.

FanHouse gathers around the TV to bring you insights from Bowl Season '08.

Wake Forest headed into the 2008 Eagle Bank Bowl -- the first and obviously most prestigious of all postseason college events -- heavily disappointed with their season. A late loss to N.C. State sealed their fate as a lower tier bowl team, but it was an earlier home loss to Navy that had really derailed their season.

Well, that and the fact that offensive coordinator Steed Lobotzke convinced Jim Grobe that running the ball 55 times against Miami would guarantee Wake a win. Fortunately, the EBB gave the Demon Deacons redemption on both counts as Wake downed the Midshipmen 29-19 in the first game of the bowl season.

Oddly enough, the score doesn't indicate two things very well: 1) Riley Skinner was perfect passing, going 11-11 for 166 yards passing and 2) the Deacs had to come back. Navy scored the first 13 points of the game and Wake looked horrible on both sides of the ball and, well, it looked like a repeat of earlier this year.

Skinner and Wake woke up at the end of the second half and with the help of Josh Adams' pair of short yardage touchdowns, came away with a fairly decisive victory.