The North Dakota State Bison and the Sacramento State Hornets will play in the FBS this fall. With their arrival, the FBS now has 138 teams to account for this upcoming season. The ethos of this newsletter is that it is for sports fans who want to know a little about a lot. With so many teams, and so little time, who could blame you if you might have missed one of the best stories in college football last season – Wake Forest won nine games under first-year head football coach Jake Dickert.
Before the season, FanDuel placed the Demon Deacons’ betting odds win total at 4.5 wins. It was the second-lowest win-total mark in the ACC – Stanford had the betting win total in the conference at 3.5 wins. The latter went 4-8 and was one of the worst teams in the conference. The former went 9-4 and was one of the best teams in the conference. The Demon Deacons were second in the conference in limiting touchdowns once opposing offenses got into the Red Zone. Wake Forest finished 18th in the FBS in DFEI, per BCFToys. Along that same line, the Demon Deacons nearly won double-digit games with an offense that finished 90th in FBS in OFEI, per BCFToys.
First-year head coach Jake Dickert has now won a combined 17 games across his last two seasons at Washington State and Wake Forest. Interestingly enough, he has proven to have a knack for winning in two vastly different ways. In 2024, with star quarterback John Mateer under center, the Cougars won eight games, led by their offense, and finished 38th in OFEI, while the DFEI was 89th. The latter stat, DFEI, was one spot better than the 2025 Demon Deacon offense.
Dickert’s starting quarterback in 2025, the well-traveled Robbie Ashford, finished 15th in QBR in the ACC, 105th among qualified FBS passers overall. And Dickert’s Deacons were still a very questionable late-game call against Georgia Tech away from finishing the season with double-digit wins.
Dickert’s presumed starting quarterback in 2026 is Gio Lopez, a North Carolina and South Alabama transfer, who reunites with his former offensive coordinator, Rob Ezell, from their time in Mobile, after a disastrous one-year pit stop in Chapel Hill last season. Interestingly enough, Lopez finished one spot ahead of Ashford in QBR last season. There are a lot of reasons for optimism as it pertains to Ezell reuniting with Lopez, as the latter posted the third-best QBR in the SunBelt in 2024. Lopez was second in EPA among qualified QBs in the SunBelt, too. A bounce-back season for Lopez with Ezell is certainly in the cards and could lead to another fun season of Demon Deacon football in Winston-Salem this fall.
It was an odd year for the four North Carolina schools in the ACC. Duke finished the season with nine wins and won the ACC, but missed out on the College Football Playoff as a P4 conference champion. (They then lost their star quarterback, Darian Mensah, to the lone ACC team that made the CFP, Miami, where the Blue Devils’ current head football coach, Manny Diaz, was last a head football coach at. Phew.) Bill Belichick made his debut, and the Tar Heels went 4-8 in a brutal Year 1 for perhaps the greatest NFL head coach of all time. NC State bounced back from an out-of-character disastrous 2024 campaign, in which the Wolfpack went 6-7 and finished 15th in the ACC in defense, and developed and then retained its star quarterback, CJ Bailey, for at least one more season. You could also tell me that all four North Carolina programs feel most like 8-4 teams in 2026, and that would seem about right.
There are all sorts of intertwining storylines between these four schools. The Demon Deacons added the Tar Heels’ starting quarterback from last year. The Wolfpack, not the Blue Devils, returns its star quarterback from a season ago. The latter lost its star quarterback to Miami, where the former star quarterback starred in high school. The pressure is on Belichick’s Tar Heels to go bowling in 2026, while Dickert’s Demon Deacons are playing with house money after winning nine games last year when the program won a combined eight games the previous two seasons. Three of the four programs will start transfer quarterbacks in their first season at their new school, with NC State being the lone exception. Bailey at NC State is the best bet to be the best of the bunch this fall, but there is all sorts of intrigue around Lopez and Ezell, Billy Edwards Jr. and Bobby Petrino, and even Walter Eget and Jonathan Brewer. We know Kurt Roper and Bailey work — the latter was 3rd among ACC quarterbacks in passer rating last season, with only Mensah and Carson Beck ahead of him. There could be fun stories galore for all four of these programs on offense in 2026.
But I think Wake Forest was the best story of the bunch last year, and very well could be the best story of the bunch this year.
However, because there are so many great stories in the sport, particularly in their own conference with the Hurricanes’ CFP run, Clemson and Florida State’s continued decline, Virginia and Duke’s surprising surge, it was only natural to overlook Dickert and his Demon Deacons. Nobody thought that the ACC championship would pit the Cavaliers against the Blue Devils, and most folks didn’t think Wake Forest would be dangerously close to ten wins in Dickert’s first season in Winston-Salem.
Could Dickert’s Year 2 surprise at Wake Forest be a trip to the 2026 ACC title game? It’s certainly possible because in the current makeup of the ACC, anything and everything is possible for so many different teams, it seems. If it were to happen, don’t be surprised that it was Dickert, who has won the last two seasons consistently, even with extreme deficiencies on one side of the ball, who was the head coach that pulled it off.