Wake Forest Took the Hottest Name in Coaching Off the Market. Jake Dickert Is 17-5 and Staying.
Wake Forest announced Thursday afternoon that it had signed Jake Dickert to a long-term contract extension. That is the whole news, and it is bigger than it sounds.
Dickert was the most wanted man in college football coaching. Florida State fired Mike Norvell on Nov. 1 and hired Jeff Purinton as athletic director a week later. Maryland fired Mike Locksley on Oct. 21. Baylor fired Dave Aranda in late October. Dickert’s name was on all of those boards, and a Wake Forest athletic department with the smallest stadium in the Power Four had no obvious way to keep him.
It kept him anyway.
What He Has Done There
Dickert is 17-5 at Wake Forest since being introduced on Dec. 19, 2024. He went 9-4 in his first season, the most wins by a first-year head coach in program history. He is 8-1 right now, second in the ACC, and ranked No. 13 in the selection committee’s Nov. 10 rankings. His only loss came at Miami.
Last week he beat No. 16 Louisville 30-27. Saturday he takes an 8-1 team to SMU at noon on ESPN with a spot in the ACC Championship Game live.
His career head coaching record is 40-25, counting 23-20 at Washington State. He has never coached at a traditional power. He replaced Dave Clawson, who went 67-69 over 11 seasons and resigned two days before Dickert was hired.
The Money Nobody Will Confirm
Wake Forest did not disclose the length or the value. Neither did the school’s release, FootballScoop or On3. Anyone putting a number on this contract is making it up.
Athletic director John Currie said he is grateful for “his and Candice’s commitment and trust,” and said the timing was chosen to end outside speculation so the team could focus on the rest of the season. That is a polite way of saying the Deacons watched three Power Four jobs open up around their 8-1 coach and decided to stop the bleeding before it started.
What makes it work is that Wake has quietly been spending. Boosters Bob McCreary and Ben Sutton each put in $5 million toward the first $10 million of an indoor practice facility and football operations center. The school is redeveloping the area around its stadium into a mixed-use project called The Grounds, due to open next fall, with Currie citing an expected $1.2 billion economic impact over the next decade.
Dickert himself has been blunt about where he sits in the roster spending hierarchy. Asked to rank Wake’s spending within the ACC, he said: “Lower third.” Top-end rosters in this sport now run past $50 million. Wake is nowhere near that.
He Told You This Was Coming
Dickert said it out loud to Ben Portnoy of FOX Sports before any of this was official.
“We didn’t come here to leave.”
He also said of the programs circling him, “They know exactly where I sit,” and about Wake’s ambitions, “We have to be sprinting in this lane, and I believe we can do that.”
Coaches say that kind of thing every November and leave in December. This one signed.
Florida State Has a Problem
The Seminoles have a new athletic director, an open head coaching job and no obvious answer, and the candidate a large part of their fan base had already settled on just signed somewhere else. Maryland and Baylor are shopping in the same aisle with less to offer.
Wake Forest has the smallest stadium in the Power Four and spends in the lower third of its own conference. It also has an 8-1 team and a coach under contract. The biggest fight of this coaching cycle got settled without anybody throwing a punch.
A longtime sports reporter, Carlos Garcia has written about some of the biggest and most notable athletic events of the last 5 years. He has been credentialed to cover MLS, NBA and MLB games all over the United States. His work has been published on Fox Sports, Bleacher Report, AOL and the Washington Post.
