Shutdown Fullcast - BONUS EPISODE: Wakeyleaks, from It Seemed Smart

Episode Date: November 16, 2018

Wake Forest coach Dave Clawson thought something was up when the Louisville defense read the Demon Deacons’ plays like they knew what was coming — even with plays Wake Forest had never used before. Teams have had spies for as long as college football has existed, but Wake was dealing with something entirely new: The plays were being stolen by someone standing on their own sideline. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, fullcast friends. A special surprise for you on the feed today. It's the WakeyLeaks episode of It Seemed Smart. My co-hosts Spencer Hall's fun new podcast about so many dumb things that people in and around sports decide would be smart. As this episode discusses, the events of Wakey Leaks helped lead to one of the most iconic sad, dumb images in college football history. That's right. Frank Beamer raising his hands in triumph with the score zero zero below him. God, it will live forever in my heart, my cold, dead heart. We hope you enjoy listening to it features several members of prominent North Carolina Twitter and, of course, our mostly tame bear, Spencer Hall. On November 14, 2014, the Wake Forest Demon Deacons hosted the Virginia Tech Hokies for a college football game in Raleigh, North Carolina. Thanks, Tom, fans out early this morning on a beautiful sunny day in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Virginia Tech comes to.

This game did not decide a championship for a bowl game. This game did not decide a championship for either team. It didn't get either team to a bowl game. No records were set. No legendary moments happened. If anyone talks about this game, they talk about it because the opposite was true. Both teams traded punts and turnovers. Wake Forest tried two field goals, and they missed.

missed both. Virginia Tech was worse. They didn't even get to try a field goal, much less come close to scoring a touchdown. They've been playing ACC football since 1953. This is the only game that ended in regulation at zero zero. The only one. When Wake Forest missed a game-winning field goal at the end of the second half, the lasting image is grim football comedy. I asked North Carolina talk radio host Joe Obie's and reporter Lauren Brownlow about it. They remember the lasting image from the game that came to be called 0-0. Well. For the game, for the first ACC win of the year, high snap. The kick is no good.

We're going overtime. And just that moment at the end of the game, Wake's kicker normally very good, by the way. This is a field goal that he should have made, Mike Weaver, and you see Frank Bieber, like, holding his hands high. at the zero-zero-regulation tie. You know, it just was like, wow, his joy at that moment. There are no ties anymore in college football.

Even in a game like this, where no one wanted to win or lose, Virginia Tech missed their second field goal in overtime. Mercifully, Wake Forest hit theirs, giving the Demon Deacons a badly needed 6-3 win. Both teams probably burned the film of the game afterwards, or at least they should have. In retrospect, there was one thing Wake Forest could have noticed, though.

At certain times in the game, on certain plays, it looked almost like Virginia Tech knew what plays Wake Forest was about to run. There's a good reason for that. Someone at Wake Forest had given the Hokies some of the plays ahead of time. It wouldn't be the first time, and it wouldn't be the last that this happened. From SB Nation and the Box Media Podcast Network, this is It seems smart at the time. I'm Spencer Hall, and today we're going to talk about the least effective and most dramatic cheating scandal in the recent history of college football, WikiLeaks.

Joe Obies is a talk radio host in Raleigh, North Carolina. Wake Forest doesn't have much of a presence on... Let me rephrase here. I'm trying to find a nice way of putting this. Lauren Brownlow is a reporter and columnist for W.R. RALSports.com. Joe Gillio is a reporter who covers sports

for the Raleigh News and Observer. Wake Forest fans are newspaper readers. They're all older than 60. I was going to, yeah. I was recalling something that I said to you the last time that I think makes that point very, very relevant. I think it's about lawyers last time. Yes, yes. Joe Ovies, Joe Jillio, and Lauren Brownlow

got together to tell me the story of Wake Forest football. They've worked in the area for a long time and I'll agree on one thing here. When it comes to football in the state of North Carolina, Wake Forest flies well below the radar. You have to understand they have the smallest stadium, I believe in Division I. Certainly Power 5, they have a small stadium. They have to have one of the smallest student bodies.

It's tiny, relatively speaking. It's also a basketball school in a basketball crazy state and has to compete in the ACC against perennial powers like Florida State, Clemson, and Virginia Tech. Football has always been in. an uphill battle at Wake. One story about a recruit coming to Wake Forest sums up the entire Wake Forest football experience. The host was certain that their recruit would be underwhelmed by Wake Forest. Problem solved.

He took the recruit to Duke's campus instead. Here's Joe Ovey is telling an old story that illustrates Wake Forest Place in the pecking order of North Carolina football. You'll hear Joe Gillio in there too. Peahead Walker, the head coach, at Wake Forest gets George to pay a visit. This is when Wake Forest was in the actual city of Wake Forest,

which was a small church campus and had a small stadium, just like it still has a small stadium now. So Walker picks up Bill George at the airport and then takes him straight to Duke's campus. Now, in 1948, Wallace Wade Stadium is a palace. Fresh off of hosting the Rose Bowl. Right. I mean, Wallace Wade is a palace in 1948, okay? And you've got the architecture, the Gothic architecture of Duke on the Trinity campus.

I mean, it's really impressive. So Walker takes him on a tour, and he says, this is where you're going to be playing. So George is like, dang, all right. And George goes on to be an NFL Hall of Famer, right? And he plays at Wake Forest. He signs right there. He's like, sweet. And then he goes to Wake Forest, the actual campus after he had signed and he starts

taking classes. And he's like, where the hell am I? What is this? This is not the campus he took me to, except for the day that he actually went and played Duke in football. And he's like, wait a minute. This is where I was. And apparently the way, you know, it's all hearsay at this point. But the way the story goes is that he goes to Peahead Walker.

He's like, hey, man, he said, this is where I'd be playing. And Walker's response was, well, I didn't lie. You were going to play here. And here you are. You're playing in the stadium right now. And that was that. But it illustrates where Wake Forest has always been in the pecking order for the Big Four. Not the greatest program.

But still, there's money here. big-time college football money, and enough lawyers in the area who care enough to write some checks and keep the football program alive. In 2006, the Demon Deacons actually won their conference for just the second time in history. In response, the administration gave head coach Jim Grob a raise, taking a salary to just over $2 million a year. Wake was still playing for real stakes and for the millions of dollars in conference TV payouts that came with it, which is why when Jim Grob retired at the end of 2013, season, Wake Forest went out and outbid several other suitors for bowling green coach Dave Closson.

Closson is sort of interesting, at least on a football coaching curve. He list his favorite band as talking hits. He isn't a system guy or a disciple of a major coaching figure like Nick Savan or Bill Belichick. He is known first and foremost as someone to call when your program has hit the skids. Here's Joe Gillio on Dave Closson. In Dave Closson, you're talking about a guy who has, he's a classic, Rebuilder. Bowling Green, Richmond, Wake Forest. He's found a way to take a program that's just been awful and turn them into a 7, 8, 9, 10-win team. And in year 4, 5, 6, you know, that's what

he is. Closson was also known for being pretty laid back in a profession short on laid-back people, accommodating as far as coaches went, especially when it came to the media. He kept practice is open, for instance. He did this because his well-like predecessor Jim Grobe did. I think he made a conscious effort when he was hired to continue some of those things. That is unusual. Most football coaches will go to outrageous lengths to keep even minor details about their program a secret. Worse, they see sabotaged by the opponent everywhere. Joe Obie says NC State coach Dave Doran, after a loss to Clemson in 2017, suspected NC State had somehow been hacked. One of his security detail had mentioned it because he was also steamed in the way that they lost and he had mentioned the laptop and then apparently Doren had also mentioned to like one other administrator like, yo, what's that about? Note, NC State wasn't using laptops at the time to do anything during a game with football.

That didn't stop Doren, whose team had just endured a tough 38, 31 loss to Clemson from fixating on the laptop and the possibility that it somehow had something to do with the loss. And rather than wait to talk to administrators about it, Doran just dropped a casual, weird accusation of something nefarious into the middle of the post-game press conference. There was no context added or anything like that, and he just went guns blazing into the press conference. And, you know, he's known to be a little salty after losses anyway. So he sort of let that one fly and just casually mention, oh, you know,

there's a laptop. We don't know what that was all about. Clemson was using the laptop. Not the football team at Clemson, but definitely someone from Clemson, Clemson's social media team. I mean, the laptop was basically being used to put up pictures or videos that recruits would see and be impressed by. Spies! Or, you know, just interns making good Instagram. That kind of paranoia and security comes with the job anyway. But the advent of big TV money into college football has put coaches under more and more pressure

to produce wins. Winning means bigger contracts for you and your staff, more money coming in from alumni giving to the program, and better recruits coming into the program. Losing means getting fired, including your whole staff and their families who have to move with the coaches to their next job. That is immense pressure. That pressure aggravates something football coaches already suffer enough from, the fear that someone somewhere might have information you don't. November 11th, 2016. Wake Forest is arriving at Papa John Stadium in Louisville, Kentucky. This is a Friday walkthrough.

Teams go over final details, review plays, get used to the field. The Louisville Cardinals were just finishing up their practice as the Demon Deacons arrived. This is Joe Giulio talking about what they found when they got there. Yeah, so they went through, Wake Forest went through their walkthrough down at Louisville Stadium, and one of the managers from Wake Forest actually found the play card. that Louisville had been using for their walkthrough. This isn't unusual. Teams leave trash behind all the time.

Equipment, things they forgot in the hurry to get into the locker room. Sometimes that means accidentally leaving behind play cards. Study aids, basically, for players preparing for what they'll see from the other team. On second glance, they weren't ordinary. One of the managers picked it up and he goes, these are our plays and actually bought it to Dave Clausen. And, you know, from there, that's... when I believe Wake Forest started going through the proper channels with the ACC to say, you know, this isn't just, they stole signs or they're, you know, scouting us or, you know,

had some sort of information, like secondhand information. These plans weren't the usual cheat sheets coaches used to get players into position against certain plays. They weren't even general shots of the Wake Forest offense, stuff they could have seen on game film available to anyone. They actually had play cards with plays. again, that Wake Forest had not used previously in a game. They were detailed descriptions of formations.

Wake had drawn up specifically for Louisville and that the Demon Deacons had never used before. The next day, Wake played Louisville. What the players heard in the game only confirmed what Wake Forest coaches already suspected. After the game, the players had said, look, we were lined up to do some stuff that they were calling out on the field, what we were about to do.

Best play in this first quarter before that one had been a seven-yard run for the Cardinals. Wake, the less talented, less developed team here by far, got out to a 12-0 lead. They played three quarters of really close football against a better Louisville team before the roof caved in, and the Cardinal scored 34 points in the fourth quarter to win 4412. That might have bothered Wake Forest coach Dave Clausen, but at least losing to Louisville in his first year was expected. The unexpected discovery of the weekend was worse. Someone inside the Wake Forest program had given Louisville the game plan. The Cardinals knew to some extent what plays were coming

and what formations they would be used in and where the ball was going on those plays. The following Monday, after meeting with Wake Forest administrators, Claussen appeared on local radio and said it out loud. At that point, we knew we had been compromised. And as a result, you know, a lot of those things that we had prepared, we couldn't run because we knew they had it. They needed to stop it, or Wake Forest, already at a disadvantage in a lot of ways,

playing with a staff desperately trying to get the program moving, would be playing teams that knew what was coming before they ever snapped the ball. They needed to figure out who the mole was. Let's talk about cheating for. a second specifically cheating in football cheating in football is it's actually kind of hard there isn't any equipment that can help you hit someone harder the whole system of penalties and fouls it exists to prevent players from cheating on the field they've tried oh man if they tried i mean one reason football's rule book is its own legal system is because people have tried pretty much everything

right down to biting, calling out the snap count for the other team, and pretending to fumble forward into the end zone for a cheap TD. Counterintuitively, football's brutality keeps it kind of honest. There's one place football tries to cheat like crazy, though. The theft of information. Football is complex, complex enough to require plans, detailed, sometimes insanely complicated plans. Those plans get more and more complex through the levels of competition.

By the time someone gets to college, for instance, those playbooks can be the size of a good reference book. Alabama's playbook, under Coach Nick Saban, is 430 pages long all by itself. That's all true, and yet, they're individual plans for specific games, too, each tailor to exploit the opponent's unique weaknesses. Those plays are sent into the players on the field

from the sideline with some kind of signal, signals that can, depending on the game, change more than once within the game itself. It's almost easy to first. forgive someone for making comparisons between the military and football when it's all laid out like that. Football is, in a lot of ways, about moving pieces around a board in the smartest way possible. And to do that, you need to have good information about your opponent and to give away as little information about yourself as possible. It's hard not to

see spies everywhere. Not when the most infamous recent scandal in football cheating was literally called SpyGate and involved the best football coach of his generation filming the signals other teams used to send him plays. And if that is the question here, if even Bill Belichick and the New England Patriots are peeping around to get an advantage, well, why shouldn't everyone else? The first question most people asked

when the news broke about someone leaking Wake Forest playbook wasn't who. As Joe Ovies tells, it was, why? The reaction after finding out about Wiki League simply was, hold on a second. You're telling me you need that kind of help to beat a bad Wake Forest team. As Joe points out, this was Wake Forest, historical speed bump of the ACC, and at that moment, a downtrodden team that was rebuilding.

It's not that cheating was outrageous. It's that cheating to beat Wake Forest was outrageous. Going to any links besides showing up seemed unnecessary. Covert operations to steal their playbook? Well, that would be Donrott comical. Then again, if Louisville was doing this to beat Lowly Wake Forest, where did it stop elsewhere? If Louisville thinks they need to steal play cards to get the advantage on Wake Forest, well, then, what are they doing against Clemson?

What are they doing against Florida State? Have other teams tried to do this sort of thing? Wake Forest needed to figure out how far this went. They started their investigation. Not much as not. known about exactly how they went about it. The school is, after all, private. They're not subject to a lot of the reporting requirements that a public university would be. They kept the details to themselves, and never had to publish a formal report. The pool of suspects was pretty shallow,

though. It included one person, not on the coaching staff, with access to information, that someone the staff had to talk to every week about what they might do on the field against a new opponent, someone who would be around the program at every game and who knew everyone in the building. The investigation quickly zeroed in on that one person, Wake Forest radio commentator Tommy Elrod. Elrod was a coach on the former staff. Dave Closson fired him along with most of the old staff when he arrived at Wake Forest. That's common when a new coach comes in, they bring their own people. They might keep a few staffers from the previous regime, but for the most part, it's an all-new crew, and everyone else is let go.

Elrod didn't leave Wake Forest, though. Wake Forest made accommodations for him for a few reasons. Tommy was a player there. He was a coach there, and he had some problems. His family lost the newborn son, and that's tragic. And I think that really, obviously that really affected him. When Claussen came in to replace Jim Grobe and didn't retain Elrod, there was a move to keep him around. He was the quarterback's coach for Jim Grope.

So it was almost like, well, what can we do? What can we, what position can we give him to keep him around so that he, he was a move? He's still gainfully employed and feels like he's still part of the program. And the radio analyst job was the answer. Elrod also did some other important work, getting wealthy alumni to write checks to the football program. Joe Jillio is a sports writer for the Raleigh News and Observer, who covered Wakey Leaks when it happened. He can't say for sure how Wake figured out Tommy Elrod was the leak in the building. But whatever Wake did to get to Elrod, it happened fast.

they must have figured out that I think they just confronted him and then I think he copped to it and then you know the question was well who did you actually have contact with who did you end up actually giving the information too Elrod has enough expertise to accurately describe what Wake Forest is going to do in the right way too

he was the radio guy but he was also a former coach he could say it in the way that other coaches would need to hear it he spoke their language He also had the connections with former co-workers needed to leak this to opponents. Former staffers he worked with under Clausen's predecessor, Jim Grob, and other coaches Elrod knew from conventions and other coaching circuit events. All of them would want that information in order to get an edge. I think it was really just as simple as these were guys he had coached with. And I think he would just call them and say, you know, here's some plays I saw in practice.

And they would have similar terminology, right? Why do it, though? Joe Giulio thinks it has something to do with Elrod losing his position on the Wake Forest football staff when Dave Claussen took over his head coach. Elrod had a radio job, sure, but he had to feel like it was a demotion from his previous job as quarterback's coach. When he wasn't given a full-time position as a coach, you know, you see this a lot in different colleges. It's not unique to Wake Forest. You feel like as a player, I gave a lot to this school and his assistant coach on, you know, their most successful football team of all time. you feel like, man, I've earned a little bit of something here.

And however gently they made the decision not to include him on the actual coaching staff, he obviously took that as, I'm going to get back at you for sliding me. Let's pause here for a second and ask, what was Elrod's end game? The short answer is he probably didn't have one. Step one was give opponent information about Wake Forest football. Step two, watch Wake Forest lose. There is no step three, because bad ideas don't usually have end games or goals. They're just bad ideas.

It's a stretch to say that Elrod's plan even got to step two. Wake Forest released an official statement on WakeyLeaks in the first week of December, just after the season. The report revealed that Elrod shared plays with three teams, Army, Louisville, and Virginia Tech. The results for games where the other team had some of Wake's plays, including plays, designed specifically for use against the other team should have been uniformly bad. Here's Joe Tillyo. What's crazy about the WikiLeaks games? There's four of them, okay?

There's the Virginia Tech game in 2014. There's two games with Army in 14 and 15, and then there's Louisville in 16. Wake Forest actually went three and one in the Wakey League's games. That is correct. Wake Forest actually won three games and lost one in games where the other team knew at least part of what was coming their way. This wouldn't be crazy if Wake Forest was a generally winning team at the time. Wake Forest was not a generally winning team at the time. They were 9 and 20 in the other games where they didn't have the information.

So you can make an argument. It's almost like Wake was better off in the Wake League games. In the end, it's not that Tommy Elrod's plan didn't do what it was supposed to. In effect, it could be our... argued that Tommy Elrod might have engineered the least effective cheating scheme in history. He might have made Wake Forest better while trying to make it worse. Wake Forest fired Tommy Elrod in December of 2014. The schools that received information from Elrod, Virginia Tech, Army, and Louisville, discipline in the coaches involved.

The immediate damage from Wakey Leaks was limited, though the exact motivation for why any of it happened in the first place remains unclear. Life for Tommy Elrod afterwards has been quiet, but certainly not easy. More lucrative than imagined, but not easy. Yeah, you know, I think you're talking about a guy who has been disgraced. But, interestingly enough, he signed an out-disclosure agreement and was paid. So Wake Forest mitigated the situation by saying, this was bad, you were wrong, but we're going to pay you to go away. As for Dave Claussen and Wake Forest, they've gotten better and moved on, though Claussen closes practices during game weeks now and keeps a close eye on who gets information about the program.

In his own words, it changed the way they do business forever. Let's go back to zero-zero, though. That game we talked about at the start, when no one scored, a historic achievement and football nothingness. That was one of the Wakey League's games. There is so much invested in football. Yes, even at Wake Forest, one of the smallest programs in FBS football, even they get around $26 million a year, just for putting a team on the field.

Coaches get paid millions for their expertise because it's presumably so special and specialized that football's worth all this money spent on a game. And the primary thing coaches are offering is control about how it will all go, right? They're offering some certainty. They bring plans, schemes, schedules. They worry about everything,

right down to a rogue laptop on the sidelines at one of their games that might be hacking into servers that they don't have in the first place. They'll worry about that even if they don't have servers. And in this game on one side, there's a coach with no clue he is working uphill against a team with his plays. He's facing off against Frank Beamer, whose team has some of Wake's plays, and who is one of the best coaches of his generation. Yet, on one day, they get together, and absolutely nothing happens.

Nothing. Virginia Tech, with all that preparation and knowledge, does absolutely zero with it. On the other side, Wake Forest, playing at a real disadvantage, does nothing as well. There aren't supposed to be accidents in football, at least not on paper. This is an accident, though. This is a nightmare. So is the point that we don't know what exactly we're paying coaches all this money for in the first place? I think it might be that we're definitely paying them for organization.

But that football might be resistant to too much control, right? that we definitely overestimate what anyone can do in a contact sport with 22 moving parts. It's all a little more random than anyone might want to admit. Random to the point or even trying to sabotage a team from the inside might not work, where it might even help you accidentally. Maybe that's why Frank Beamer's smiling. He knows that Zero Zero isn't a joke in football. It's just something that can happen.

Because the game can spit out anything at any moment. Or maybe he thought, at last, perfection. A game without points. And a pointless game is a pretty cruel but accurate summary of WikiLeaks. Jonathan Hirsch is our show's producer, Nishat Kurwa, is Vox Media's executive producer of audio, research, editing, and script support by Holly Anderson. Thanks also to Elena Bergeron and Jen Holmes.

I'm Spencer Hall, and I'll see you soon. Thank you.