Grobe leads historic run

Sam Hollenbach’s long pass for Isaiah Williams sailed out of bounds with 3:57 remaining in last night’s de facto ACC Atlantic Division title game at Byrd Stadium, and then it was that Wake Forest coach Jim Grobe could be certified as this season’s most unlikely and most definite college football genius.

The pass was Maryland’s last gasp in its doomed bid to overhaul the Demon Deacons in what ended as a 38-24 defeat for the game-but-flawed Terrapins. And so Wake will turn up in next Saturday’s ACC Championship game against Georgia Tech while Maryland crawls back into its shell and waits to learn its own postseason destination.

One guess is that the Terps will visit Charlotte, N.C., for a date against Navy in the Meinike Car Care Bowl on Dec. 30. The second meeting in fortysomething years between the Washington area rivals would have a certain appeal, but it pales in comparison with Maryland’s wasted opportunity to snatch an ACC title and a spot in the Orange Bowl.

Charlotte is a dandy city, but the Terps wanted no part of it before Wake spoiled any greater dreams. Yet Maryland helped dig its own hole by forgetting the last two weeks how to hold onto a football.

Two season-ending victories would have sent the Terps to Jacksonville no matter what anyone else did. But last weekend at Boston College, they handed the Eagles three touchdowns and paid a 38-16 price. Last night the usually reliable Hollenbach was intercepted three times in the first half, setting up one touchdown and allowing the Deacons to maintain ball control. And did they ever.

Putting it simply, the Deacons ran and rammed the ball right up the Terps’ collective rump. Wake finished with 296 yards rushing and put together touchdown drives of 69, 80, 80 and 76 yards — mostly on the ground — while Maryland defenders gaped, gawked and missed tackles.

But enough about Maryland, which will remember this season as one of lost opportunities despite strong overall improvement after a pair of yawn-inducing 5-6 campaigns. We should tip our caps, as well as a glass or two, to the Deacons — long an ACC football doormat — for their gallant rise from last year’s 4-7 record to this fall’s 10-2.

And if the national coach of the year award has anybody else’s name on it but Grobe’s, for shame. In his sixth season in Winston-Salem, this 54-year-old University of Virginia grad looks like the greatest coach since … well, since Ralph Friedgen arrived at Maryland in 2001 and instantly resurrected a long-dormant program.

Last night, though, all the Fridge could do was look on enviously as Grobe’s troops — steered marvelously by redshirt freshman quarterback Riley Skinner — burnished their newfound credentials as a pigskin power. And as far as the ACC title game is concerned, I suspect everybody north or south of Georgia might be bellowing, “Go Deacs!” You see, everybody loves a Cinderella story, and Wake has created a dandy.

Although Grobe produced a couple of winning seasons and even took Wake to something called the Seattle Bowl his first two seasons after relocating from Ohio University, the program then regressed — just as Friedgen’s did at Maryland after three wonderful autumns. From 2003 through 2005, the Deacons were just 13-21 overall and 7-17 in the ACC. Which is why they were picked to finish fourth in the Atlantic Division this season.

It goes to show you, again, what football experts know. And why teams persist in playing the games despite dire prognostications and prospects.

And you really couldn’t blame all the Doubting Thomases — or all those equally skeptical Dicks and Harrys. Through most of the Deacons’ sad football history, the word wake was most appropriate. Consider their all-time records against some ACC enemies through 2005: Florida State, 2-21-2; Georgia Tech, 7-20; Duke, 31-53-2; North Carolina, 32-67-2; N.C. State, 33-60-6 … and Maryland, 13-40-1.

The ACC’s smallest school (current undergraduate enrollment: 4,037) simply didn’t have the numbers and most years the talent — to compete in Division I-A football. Sure, the Deacons won an ACC title in 1970, Richard Nixon’s sophomore season as president, but the retroactive suspicion is that all the other teams must have been sleeping off the traumatic 1960s.

How bad was Wake Forest football for most of the 20th century? Well, its most famous player was running back Brian Piccolo, who got that way by dying of cancer at 26. Another of Wake’s few all-Americans was quarterback Norman Snead, whose biggest subsequent contribution to the Washington Redskins was getting traded for Sonny Jurgensen in 1964.

So how do you explain this season? Beats me and probably Grobe himself.

One answer — perhaps the answer — is that this Wake Forest team just doesn’t know how to quit. All it knows how to do, apparently, is shock people.

“I couldn’t be more proud of my players,” Grobe said after the Deacons became the first ACC team ever to go 6-0 on the road. And you know what — I feel sorry for Georgia Tech next Saturday.