Former Wake Forest Coach on Retirement: ‘I Did Not Want To Do This’

Now-retired Wake Forest football coach Dave Clawson said he didn’t want to step down. But he did anyway.

“In my perfect world I’d be having this press conference in three or four years,” Clawson, 57, told reporters gathered in Winston Salem, N.C. on Tuesday. “But I just looked at kind of where the industry is right now, and I just felt like it was time.”

Clawson hinted that the shifting landscape of college sports, including NIL (name, image, and likeness) rules and the transfer portal, was not something he wanted to try and tackle moving forward.  “You can’t do something successfully, and it’s not fair to the players or the institution if you’re doing something that your whole heart and soul isn’t into,” he said.

Wake Forest finished with a 4–8 record for the second consecutive season, after seven straight seasons with a bowl appearance. Clawson was 67–69 in his tenure at Wake Forest, which is a private university with an enrollment under 10,000, and will likely not have as much NIL money to offer players in 2025 and beyond.

“I tried to embrace it; I tried to fight through it,” Clawson said of the new-age college football world. “I tried to get in the mindset with it. I could do it, I just don’t want to do it. It’s really where I am. It’s not the way I’m wired. It’s not how I build programs. It’s not why I got into coaching.”

Clawson’s retirement mirrors Tony Bennett’s departure from the Virginia men’s basketball team. In October, the national-championship-winning coach, 55, stepped down and said the NCAA is “not in a healthy spot.”

Last offseason, Nick Saban, then 72, retired from Alabama and has since lamented the state of college sports, too.