Wake Forest hires Washington State's Jake Dickert to follow Dave Clawson as football coach

Wake Forest moved quickly in reaching across the country to find its next football coach.

The school hired Washington State's Jake Dickert on Wednesday, two days after Dave Clawson resigned unexpectedly following 11 seasons that included regular bowl bids and an Atlantic Coast Conference division title.

“Coach Dickert’s approach to building a program — through evaluation and development of talent with a plan rooted in detail, discipline, and an unwavering commitment to student-athlete development — reminds me of what made Dave Clawson so successful during his 11-year transformational tenure as our head football coach,” athletic director John Currie said in a statement.

“Jake’s philosophy of fostering personal growth, cultivating trust within the team, and relentlessly competing for championships embodies the principles we hold dear.”

Dickert, 41, had been the defensive coordinator when he took over during the 2021 season as the Cougars' interim coach after Washington State fired Nick Rolovich for refusing a state mandate that all employees get vaccinated against COVID-19. Dickert led the team to a 3-3 finish to earn the permanent job, then went 20-17 in the three seasons since.

The Athletic first reported that Wake Forest was set to hire Dickert, whose introductory news conference was scheduled for Thursday.

“We will have a clear focus on retaining our current roster while adding valuable pieces that fit our program and Wake Forest University,” Dickert said in a statement. “Additionally, I am excited to immerse myself in this special community as throughout this process my belief that this is the perfect place for our family and our program only strengthened.”

Washington State has spent nine weeks in the AP Top 25 poll over the past two seasons, peaking at No. 13 during a five-week run amid a 4-0 start in 2023 and reaching No. 19 in early November of this season.

Washington State went 8-4 this year, the first since the Pac-12 fell apart, with the majority of its schools scattering to the ACC, Big 12 and Big Ten. Now Dickert is back in a power conference again, nine days before his Cougars are set to play No. 22 Syracuse in the Holiday Bowl (Dec. 27).

In a statement Wednesday, Washington State athletic director Anne McCoy said assistant head coach and defensive tackles coach Pete Kaligis would lead the team in the bowl game.

“This team has worked so hard and accomplished a great deal this year,” McCoy said, “they deserve to end the season with a memorable bowl game experience.”

Dickert arrived at Washington State after a three-year run at Wyoming in a career with stops at the Division II level, though those generally were at schools in the central part of the country or further west. A job at Southeast Missouri State in 2012 was his farthest east.

He'll relocate to the Eastern Seaboard for the job at Wake Forest, an elite private university in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, with one of the smallest undergraduate enrollments in the Bowl Subdivision ranks (5,471 students in the 2023-24 academic year). It comes as the Demon Deacons have had consecutive 4-8 seasons in Clawson's otherwise successful run, a product of a changing landscape in college sports that hindered Wake Forest's formula of retaining and developing players to compete with schools featuring four- and five-star prospects.

Notably, those changes have included free player movement through the transfer portal and players being able to profit from their athletic fame through name, image and likeness opportunities — a combination that has led to roster upheaval across college sports.

In Wake Forest's case, the Demon Deacons had an 11-win season that included a trip to the ACC title game in 2021, as well as brief stints in the top 10 of the AP Top 25 in 2021 and 2022 amid a run of seven straight bowl appearances before the two four-win seasons.

In an emotional news conference Tuesday, Clawson said he “just felt like it was time” to step aside to let Wake Forest take a fresh approach to the changes, which include the looming arrival of revenue sharing with athletes. He said he had “engaged” with some candidates for the job already as he shifts into an advisory role with Currie.

“I think there’s things I can help with (in) the transition,” Clawson said. “But I don’t want to be the old coach in the office that’s overlooking you or second-guessing you. I’ve told every one of them: ‘I will be as involved or uninvolved as you want me to be.’ ... If I can help the new coach with that learning curve, I’ll do it. If the new coach says, ‘Dave, stay the hell away, it’s my program,’ I will stay the hell away and do nothing but support him.”

Clawson went as far as to say it felt as if it was “somebody else’s job.”

And now, that somebody is Dickert.