What's going on in Winston-Salem?

[YmoBeThere]

I know they hadn't planned on losing their coach, but is this season a result of Dino Gaudio leaving the cupboard bare?

[YmoBeThere]

I know they hadn't planned on losing their coach...

Prosser in this case. The Gaudio departure was entirely planned.

[lawgrad91]

WFU has only 2 seniors, one of which I had never heard of before looking at their roster. They've had a lot of players leave early, be removed from the team, etc. Several of the ones who left early had loads of talent but weren't the kind of people you could base a team around. Their young guys have some talent but especially glaring today was their weakness on the interior. NCSU had a field day inside.

I go to church with a WFU chem prof who had not-very-kind things to say about some of the one-and-dones who made their way into her classes. She even threw one out of class and refused to let him come back.

[wilson]

There are a lot of things not going well in Winston. Gaudio definitely left a fairly bare cupboard, but his era (and frankly, the last couple of years of Prosser's tenure) was not exactly marked by high-character, basketball IQ kinds of guys anyway. Moreover, Bzdelik seems to have gotten the job in large part because he's the Wake AD's buddy, and he just might be in over his head. College athletics (basketball in particular) is cyclical in nature, so a down year in Winston may have been mostly inevitable regardless of who the coach is this season. But losing by 25 to one of the worst NC State teams in a long time (and I remember the Les Robinson era!) is really bad. Fans are going to continue to check out, and Wake could well be looking at a protracted period of serious decline. He obviously deserves more time, but I for one will be very surprised if Bzdelik ever digs out of this mess.

[Devil in the Blue Dress]

The football program is also on a bit of a slide, but for different reasons.

It's a bad thing to have the down cycles overlapping like this.

[wilson]

The football program is also on a bit of a slide, but for different reasons.

It's a bad thing to have the down cycles overlapping like this.

I'm far less concerned about their football program. Jim Grobe is too good of a coach for them to stay down for too long, and furthermore, that bar is somewhat lower than the basketball bar anyway (notwithstanding the fact that Deacs football has had noteworthy success far more recently than Deacs b-ball).