Finally, at long last, I got my first really good look at Tony Chennault’s game. I liked what I saw.
Chennault, the freshman point guard from Philly, was cleared for full-scale practice this week after missing three precious preseason weeks while recovering from a stress reaction in his foot. The timing of Chennault’s injury could have been worse. It’s better to be out in October and November than in January and February. But for a young player attempting to break in at college basketball’s most demanding position, the time missed was a real setback that, I imagine, will preclude him from starting tomorrow’s season opener against Stetson.
Chennault’s absence left Coach Jeff Bzdelik only one real option at the point, sophomore C.J. Harris. Harris is a talented, resourceful player who could probably be a decent fill-in at the position, especially in a system that doesn’t put as much emphasis on the point guard facilitating the half-court offense the way Ish Smith was charged with doing the past few years. But that said, I kept harkening back to 2006 when a team with some pretty good talent (Justin Gray, Eric Williams, Trent Strickland, Kyle Visser) finished 3-13 in ACC play because Chris Paul’s early departure to the NBA pretty much forced Skip Prosser to move Gray from a position he played well, wing guard, to a position where he struggled, point guard.
From what I saw Tuesday, Chennault is a quintessential point guard. He’s always looking to make the pass, and he can pass well. He can also drive and dish. He reminds me physically of Derrick McQueen, Wake’s point guard in Dave Odom’s early years as head coach. Like McQueen, Chennault is stout, with a low center of gravity, and it’s not easy to knock a player like that off the ball. There’s a great value to a player like that, especially on a team with so many players (Ari Stewart, J.T. Terrell, Travis McKie and Harris) ready and able to shoot.
The other thing I noticed about Chennault is the fire and drive with which he plays. I saw the same from classmates Terrell and McKie in last week’s exhibition victory over Guilford. Now whether I see any of that on Feb. 15 at North Carolina is a good question. But I’ll be looking for it then, just like I’ll be looking for it tomorrow night against Stetson.
At yesterday’s gathering to eat chicken and talk football, I told Jim Grobe I was blaming my black eye on him. I figured with all the flak he was catching during this seven-game losing streak, what’s one more round?
But what Jim didn’t know is I’d had already written a song about my trip into ignominy, and it goes a little something like this:
By the way, Grobe did get me back good. When I asked if who was going to play offensive line this week if Michael Hoag (concussion) and Joe Looney (ankle) weren’t available, his reply was:
“Well Dan, we were thinking about suiting you up. But anybody who can’t walk into a room without tripping, I don’t know if we can use.’‘
It goes without saying that Jim Grobe is one decent man.
In the heat of Saturday’s battle against Boston College, Coach Jim Grobe was told that Assistant Coach Billy Mitchell had been hurt.
“Somebody said `Mitch is down,’ ‘’ Grobe recalled. “I said `You’re kidding, what’s he doing in the game?’
“You know it’s going bad when the coaches start going down.’‘
Mitchell, who has coached with Grobe now for 15 straight seasons, ended up with an injured cheek bone and sinus cavity when a play spilled out of bounds and the cleats of linebacker Luke Kuechly inadvertantly caught him in the face. Mitchell returned to the game in the second half, but is sidelined this week while he recovers.
“He’s better,’’ Grobe said. “They decided yesterday that they didn’t have to do surgery, so that’s really good. So if he keeps the swelling down and he doesn’t have any problems with pain and headaches or things like that, hopefully we’ll get him back here before too long. But we want him to heal up before he starts trying coaching again.
“We might have to put him in the (coaches) box from now on, if you can get run over like that.’’
When a team loses seven straight games, the people who pull for that team are not going to be happy. It’s a fact of life. There’s no need to draw any greater sociological conclusion. As humans, we’re hard-wired to celebrate in victory and lash out in defeat. It’s that way at the University of Texas, it’s that way at the University of Colorado and it’s that way at Wake Forest.
Having established that truth, there remains the question of how the inevitable negativity that comes with losing seven straight affects those most responsible for doing something about it.
So at today’s gathering to eat chicken and talk football, I asked Jim Grobe a three-part question.
Part 1—Is there any way of knowing how your players are dealing with all the negativity that comes with a seven-game losing streak? Do you get any sense of how they’re dealing with all that?
Grobe: ``I really don’t. We’re not real touchy-feely about that stuff. I don’t meet with them and we don’t have any seances or anything like that. The thing is, we’re just trying to stay steady. We’re not changing. Our coaches aren’t changing. I’m not taking them out and going crazy and trying to punish them for not winning. We’re working harder. They know we’re not going to quit working, and when we’re not successful we’ll continue to work harder. I think that keeps you from being too much in the doldrums with the negativity because you’re working hard enough that you don’t have much time to think about it.’‘
Part 2—How is the staff dealing with it?
Grobe—“Our staff is not dealing with it very well, only because they love the kids they’re coaching. You want so badly for these guys to win. We’re going to be here. The thing you feel so bad for is some of the seniors that are not going to be around any longer. And they don’t want to hear `wait til next year.’ They want to win right now. So I think our coaching staff, most of our coaches are guys who have been around a long time and we’ve been through the ups and downs and we know that every season is not going to be a great one, and that you’ll be down some but you’ll come back. But I think for our coaching staff, the thing that’s the hardest right now is we really love these guys, these players, and we want for them like you would your own children. You want good things to happen to your own kids, so we’re trying everything we can to get them a win—because we just feel bad for them. They’re working really, really hard without any bang for their buck. I think that hurts coaches as badly as it does the players.’‘
Part 3—How are you dealing with the negativity personally?
Grobe—“I have no problems with it. I’m just like our fans. I don’t like losing. I’m disappointed. I’m more critical of myself than anybody else could be, and I’m fine with it. I don’t expect the fans to be happy when we’re not playing well. I don’t expect our players to expect the fans to be rah-rah when we’re not doing well. I think that’ s a motivator in itself. You don’t want people to feel like you’re not achieving. When you get at this level and when you decide to play college football, you’ve got to understand winning is important to everybody, not just the coaches and players. So it’s just part of it.
“It sure feels good when you’re winning. Everybody is patting you on the back and everybody enjoys that. The one thing that most people don’t realize is no win makes up for a loss. It doesn’t balance out. The loses are so much harder. You get a loss and you’re crushed, and then you get a win and that win feels OK. But it doesn’t eliminate the loss. That’s the way it is when you’re a coach. Maybe the kids don’t feel quite that way, but I know as coaches, the wins don’t cover for the losses. The losses are always devastating.’‘
Over the past two years, I know I’ve been asked at least 90 times about Ty Walker, which would make it for every minute he’s played. It’s 13 minutes against ACC competition, all of them logged as a freshman.
And I understand the fascination, certainly this season when he holds such a key to the kind of season the Deacons will end up having.
Walker was never the second best center in high school basketball or the 17th best overall. And it was ludicrous to think he was based on his ranking by some scouting service. All you had to do was see he averaged 12 points and 7 rebounds as a senior in high school against guys he towered over, and then take a look at his yearling, under-developed frame, to know that Walker was not going to walk into the ACC and play meaningful minutes. The rankings—which obviously were based on what he might some day do and not on anything he’d ever done—didn’t help him one bit. My sense it they hurt him, if nothing more by inflating his opinion of his game to the point he could not be talked into redshirting his first season.
At the first media gathering of his sophomore season, he mentioned the lobbying of the coaches to have him sit out the season and prepare himself physically and mentally for the challenge.
“And in highsight,’’ he said, “I probably should have.’‘
But ultimately none of that will make any difference if he doesn’t avail himself to the tremendous opportunity he has as a junior. He’s the man inside for an ACC team. He’s probably going to play as many minutes as he can play. Freshman Carson Desrosiers is big and possesses some skills, but he’s got his share of work to do to make a serious impact this year. And as far as centers go, there’s absolutely nobody else.
You’ve all read what new coach Jeff Bzdelik has had to say about Walker.
“All you have to do is look at him and see a long, athletic body,’’ Bzdelik said. “Our approach with Ty is this—very positive. Very positive. He’s a wonderful young man, so that’s easy. I don’t think he’s had a lot of confidence. So to me it’s like `The only time I’m going to get mad at you son is if you put your head down. And don’t ever put your head down.’ He put his head down a couple of times when I first got here and I went up to him and I simply took his chin and I lifted it and I said `Hey, what did we talk about? All I want you to do is do this for me: Play as hard as you possibily can and give me as much energy as you possibly can and if you don’t learn another thing, by accident you’ll get yourself 10 rebounds, you’ll get yourself six or seven or eight blocked shots, you’ll get some deflections and you’ll create havoc around the rim and you’ll probably get yourself two or three dunks. And if you do that, you’ll have a positive impact on the game.
“So I’m going to try to keep things very simple. `All I want you to do is just run from rim to rim as hard as you can, be as active as you can be as long as you can, stay positive and if you make a mistake, who cares? The next thing is the most important thing that you do. Just give me that. And if you do, that’s a good thing. And we can expand from there, yes. Let’s do that for starters.’
“And that’s been my approach.’‘
So if you want to gauge Walker’s progress this season, no need to look at the stat sheet to see that he had 7 points and 9 rebounds in 29 minutes against undersized Guilford. Instead I was watching his chin. It stayed up most of the time, but there were times it dropped. And there were times the coaches yelled instructions to him that he paid no visible heed. Giving him the benefit of the doubt, maybe he didn’t hear. But if Walker’s chin stays on the ground, it’s going to be a long, long season for the Deacons.
The recent trips I took to Virginia Tech and Maryland with the Wake football team were bad, but not as bad as the one I took on my way from the press box to the press conference after today’s 23-13 loss to Boston College. Always in a hurry, I caught my right foot on the raised threshold coming into the Bridger Center off the balcony, and being the clumsy oaf I am, I pitched headlong into a chair. My left cheekbone lost that battle, and I have a nice black eye and bloody nose to show for it.
There’s always embarrassment when something like this happens, but I have to say I was impressed by the treatment and concern from the good EMT folks immediately on the scene. I made it to the press conference before Coach Jim Grobe finished up, but I was really too groggy to participate. My good buddy Bill Hass, the erstwhile Wake beat guy with the Greensboro News and Record, had already taken my tape recorder down to the festivities.
I did hear the question asked why Grobe decided to punt on fourth and one from the Deacons’ 40, trailing 20-6 with five minutes remaining in the third quarter. Thanks to Bullet Bill, I had Grobe’s response recorded.
“I thought we were playing pretty good defense at the time,’’ Grobe said. “We’re still, if I’m not mistaken, about three minutes to go in third quarter. So I thought we had time.After all the interceptions we’d thrown and the fumbled punt—we turned it over five times and put them in a bad position—I really thought the worst thing we could have done there is go for it and give them the ball on the 40 going in. And that’s where it would have been.
“So I think the field position that we would have put the defense in affected my decision more than anything else. And as it turned out, we played pretty good defense and got the ball back in decent field position. So it turned out OK for us. It took more time off the clock, but I thought at that point to put the defense on the 40 with their backs against the wall was not a good thing to do.’‘
Neither was tripping and ending up sprawled out on the carpet of the Bridger Center. It was the kind of day that no one was safe, not Assistant Coach Billy Mitchell—who ended up with a swollen eye as well from a sideline collision—and not the beat guy.
But at least if this post and the piece I got up to write for tomorrow’s Journal makes less sense than my usual offerings, then I have an excuse.
Tanner Price has thrown four interceptions, Marshall Williams and Michael Campanaro have both dropped passes to dire consequences, and running back Montel Harris of BC has scored two touchdowns after breaking tackles.
So why is this game not over by halftime?
The easy answer is that Wake is playing at home against BC, and not on the road against Stanford, Virginia Tech or Maryland. The Eagles aren’t terrible, but they’re clearly down from where they were a couple of years ago..The 2007 or 2008 teams would have had a much greater cushion than 14-6.
The Eagles do get the second-half kickoff and they do have, in Harris, a player who has a real shot at Ted Brown’s record for most yards rushing in ACC history. It’s going to be a tough uphill slough for the Deacons to pull this one out, but at least they made it to halftime with a chance.
Regardless of what transpires in this most uncertain of basketball seasons, Wake will always have Guilford.
By that I mean the Deacons will have the memory of walking on the court with six scholarship players—three of them in their first college game—and tearing Division III Guilford asunder in last night’s exhibition victory at Joel Coliseum. The reason the Deacons looked much better than I expected may have had much to do with the Quakers, having lost two All-Americans and another essential player off last year’s 30-3 squad, looking a lot worse. The Quakers scrapped, but they had only one player taller than 6-4 and lacked the kind of strength and quickness it takes to dictate terms on the defensive. The Deacons got the ball where it needed to go. How much that had to do with better organization and precision instilled by new coach Jeff Bzdelik won’t be known until Wake plays an aggressive, athletic team intent on imposing its will by getting in its grill. But any team that runs the court for layups and dunks, drills 12 3-pointers on 28 tries, dishes out 21 assists (out of 32 field goals) and shoots 56 percent from the floor is going to look good, especially when it holds the other team to 17 field goals on 76 heaves.
And nobody looked better than Travis McKie, the 6-7 freshman from Richmond who showed things last night I hadn’t seen in practice. Or I’d seen them, but not like I saw them last night with fans in the stands. He’s mobile, he’s got a lightning quick release and he drilled three 3-pointers (in three tries) just like he meant to. He’s rangy and athletic enough to help in a lot of ways, like pulling down his seven rebounds and contributing two steals. I still imagine he’ll get bullied about some by the powerful kind of power forwards he’ll have to battle in the low blocks. But that same powerful power forward is also going to have to get out in a hurry if he doesn’t want to give up open 3-pointers to a player who can drain them. And down the road, the availability of Nikita Mescheriakov and Melvin Tabb should open up more opportunities for McKie to play his more natural position of wing forward.
A man who knows college basketball well enough to have won a whole lot of games coaching it mentioned that the only time J.T. Terrell shoots the basketball is when he has it. So I was grinning when Terrell came out and let five shots fly in the first 5 1/2 minutes. He made two, both 3-pointers. They turned out to be his only two 3-pointers of the game, on 10 attempts, and he finished with five field goals on a team-high 15 attempts. It bears noting he also led Wake with seven assists, and I hasten to add that none of this is to suggest that Terrell’s ready-willing-and-able approach to shooting the basketball is, necessarily, a bad thing. All teams need offense, and Terrell has it to spare. He’s certainly a player any opposing defense is going to have to take into account.
One of my all-time heroes, Coach Bighouse Gaines of Winston-Salem State, once coached a legendary gun named Reggie Gaines who he told to shoot 30 times a game. I remember House (it’s a mountain of a man who has a nickname off his nickname) said that Reggie was a role player whose role was to shoot the basketball. I’ve seen teams that bickered over who got the shots and I’ve seen teams that only cared about the shots going in. And what I haven’t seen is any reason to anticipate that this team will bicker over shots. And what I haven’t seen in J.T. Terrell is a player who cares only about getting his shots. To the contrary, I thought he played hard last night, and I thought his aggressiveness and athleticism proved really disruptive to what Guilford was trying to do offensively—as evidenced by his game-high four steals to go with his 16 points and six rebounds. He played with a passion, as did McKie. It was fun to see.
It was also fun to see everyone contribute, including walk-ons, Aaron Ingle, Denmore “Baltimore” McDermott and Ryan Keenan who logged 40 minutes among them. Keenan, a 6-4 junior from Bellaire, Tex., had the crowd up and whooping when he knocked down two 3-pointers on three tries.
Keenan’s minutes, as impressive as they were, appear numbered. The cavalry is saddling up. Ari Stewart was cleared for last night’s game, but Bzdelik said the decision was not to push him back from his hyper-extended knee, to err on the side of caution. Bzdelik also said that freshman Tony Chennault is going to give it a go full-speed for half of today’s practice. Stewart looks good to go for Friday’s opener against Stetson, and Bzdelik is hopeful Chennault will be cleared as well.
How much to make of a lopsided, early November victory over an outmatched opponent is never easy to gauge. The Deacons may end up being the surprise team of the ACC and they may end up where they were picked to finish, the cellar. The only certainty is they won’t finish worse.
And whatever happens, they’ll always have Guilford.
If you get thrown into the kind of fires that Wake has faced this football season, it’s impossible to not get singed, if not badly burnt.
Freshman quarterback Tanner Price has played seven games of college football. He was fabulous against Navy and miserable against Virginia Tech. His other five performances haven’t made anyone forget Riley Skinner but they have been sprinkled with some impressive moments. For the season, Price has completed 83 of 156 (53 percent) passes for 879 yards. He has thrown seven touchdown passes and been intercepted four times.
He ranks 10th among ACC quarterbacks with a passing efficiency rating of 110.2.
I asked Coach Grobe at this week’s gathering to eat chicken and talk football to assess Price’s performance going into tomorrow’s game against BC.
“I can’t tell you that I’m disappointed in his play,’’ Grobe said. “I’m really not.
“The best thing that Tanner’s done is he’s handled this really well. He’s really practicing hard. He’s meeting all the time with Coach Elrod. He’s taking advantage of film time. He’s going in and studying film. He’s a student of the game. He’s doing everything he can to play well. So from that standpoint I’m really happy with him. And honestly we’ve kind of had one marquee performance – and that was Josh Harris against Virginia Tech – but we haven’t had a lot of the other guys step up and play great football. I think one of the keys when you’ve got some youngsters out there is they need help. They need the other 10 guys to step up.’‘
For all the incredible numbers Skinner racked up at Wake, the most impressive was probably 31-18—the Deacons’ record in those games he started. Grobe said several times over the past four years how that’s the ultimate measure of a quarterback.
But he also recognizes that given the problems this team has had over its current six-game losing streak, Skinner was never asked to make such a difference.
“We haven’t run the football very well, and that goes to offensive line play,’’ Grobe said. “We haven’t caught a lot of balls. We’ve had a lot of drop passes, and that’s tough on a young quarterback. When you’ve got a freshman quarterback you know that you’re asking him to read defenses and make good decisions. In some cases he’s going three levels. He’s got three reads and he’s going through a progression of who he’s going to throw the football to. The hardest thing is for him to make the right decision who to throw it to. Then if he makes the right decision and the ball hits the guy in the hands and he drops it, now you’ve compounded the problem.
“So I guess I would have to tell you that I’m really pleased with what Tanner has done. I’m not telling you he’s played as good as we’d like for him to or as good as he’s capable of playing.’‘
As somebody who likes to have as much fun as the next wide-open party animal, far be it from me to berate anybody for having a good time.
But there are times when it just seems a bit much to be having too much fun. One such time, in my mind, was last Saturday during Wake’s 62-14 thumping by Maryland. On more than one occasion, a Deacon player would make a big play and then jump around like a contestant on the Price Is Right. And that was when the tide was somewhere around 30 points and rising.
I asked Coach Grobe at this week’s gathering to eat chicken and talk football if such displays bothered him as well. His response? Not necessarily.
“I like for our kids to make big plays and I want them to be enthusiastic,’’ Grobe said. “Now if they’re unsportsmanlike and they get a flag, then they’ve got major issues.
“I want our kids to have fun. I want them to play and if they make a big play I want them to be excited about it. Sometimes if they make an average play and get too excited about it it gets a little comical. But you want your kids to be excited if they make a big play and are doing good. I have no problem with that.’‘
At least, I mentioned, he never had to be concerned about any such over-the-top celebrations by Alphonso Smith. I was kidding and Grobe, by his belly laugh, knew it. The difference, of course, is that Smith rarely found himself on the wrong side of the kind of routs the Deacons are experiencing this season.
“The biggest thing that’s influenced our kids is the National Football League,’’ Grobe said. “They see all that crazy stuff going on, so they try to imitate that. It’s all about the show.’‘
