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Final regular season week | at N.C. State

It's 12:24 p.m. Tuesday and I have no idea how today's game against Liberty hasn't been cancelled yet ... but as of now, it's still going to be played.

As a programming note, I won't be going out there tonight if there is a game.

But I do have a story today: On Antonio Morales and the defensive improvements he made to get into the lineup.

As an additional programming note, the only game this weekend I'll be able to get to is the series finale at N.C. State. It's my wife's birthday on Thursday, and then I'm going to hit the UNC-Duke game on Friday night as I divvy up responsibilities.
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Football Summer football - 2024

Going to thread together summer football content here. So, it'll be preview stuff throughout the summer -- some lists, predictions, My Takes, etc.

One programming note to get out of the way now: I'm not going to ACC media days in Charlotte this year. I have a family vacation scheduled and honestly, the event has become such a TV-focused one that I don't feel like I'm missing out on too much. Maybe I'll watch the press conference stuff when WF takes the podium -- but I'm not going to bend over backward to cover it.

One note off the spring game: I missed that Wake Forest announced captains that morning. They are: Taylor Morin, DeVonte Gordon, Luke Petitbon, Jasheen Davis, Kevin Pointer and Nick Andersen. All of them make sense to me. The only real takeaway I have is that it'll be the first year since 2019 that a QB isn't a captain. No surprise there and it's obvious why; just interesting to take stock of.

N.C. A&T/Clemson week

Recap of last night's 24-7 win over N.C. A&T.

Programming note: I'll be at the Friday night and Sunday games against Clemson with full stories to follow. I'm not going to make the Saturday game because I'm going to the Josh Level Classic, a HS basketball all-star game, in Greensboro. I know I'll have a story off of it about Juke Harris; probably will find some other angles while I'm there.

As a reminder: Weekend rotation is now Chase Burns-David Falco Jr.-Josh Hartle. Michael Massey will be unavailable this weekend.
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Ending exams week (baseball)

So, here's the meat of the weekend: Recap of Sunday's doubleheader sweep of Western Carolina.

Something of a programming note/update moving forward: I'd like to get a My Take done tomorrow on where this team stands. Have some ideas percolating and frankly, I'm bored with waiting on basketball news that may or may not happen and an interview with Omaha Biliew that may or may not happen.

And then probably the most important thing I learned this weekend: Michael Massey is seeing a back specialist tomorrow (Monday). There is fear that he has a season-ending injury. Obviously he hasn't been "right" all season, as he was entering as a starter and has thrown over 70 pitches twice in 10 starts. I'm reminded of a quote from Tom Walter after his second or third start of the season that they were just going to be week-to-week with him, that sometimes he was going to be good, other times they'd be lucky to get 3-4 innings from him.

Pending how the appointment goes, the thought is that next weekend against Clemson, it'll be Burns-Falco-Hartle. Here was the full exchange with Walter about Massey today:

"Really happy with Falco, that looks like we’re going to stick with that against Clemson, as well. We’ll start Ben Shenosky on Wednesday."

How negative is the prognosis on Michael Massey?

"We won’t know more until tomorrow, he’s meeting with a specialist tomorrow to find out. There’s certainly a chance it’s a season-ender."

Is it his back?

"It’s his back, yeah. We thought it was his hamstring, but it turns out he’s got a little something going on with his back, so we’ll get him to a specialist."

Baseball - Week of 4/22 - at Elon/ND

Programming note of sorts on this week's baseball action:

I'll be headed to Elon for tonight's game; always good to check in with the alma mater, even if I don't recognize much of the campus less than 15 years after graduating.

And then I'll have weekend recap coverage of Wake's series at ND. Planning on getting a short story or two up in between tonight's game and the start of the series in South Bend.
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Football Spring football 2024

Something of a programming note to get things started ...

Wake's first of 15 spring football practices is tomorrow morning. In the interest of full transparency, I'd lost track of the days and had no idea we had already reached this point until I saw Essex's tweet about covering it.

So, you won't see a practice report here tomorrow. Or for the rest of the week. I'm back on the road for the NCAA tournament (with Duke, if that's not clear). When they figure out cloning or teleportation, I'll be really good at handling this job.

While I'm on the subject ... the spring reports are going to be a bit different this season. I'm aiming toward more feature-type stories, less on the minutiae of which second-year receiver caught three passes during a 2-minute drill. I always say that something like 50% of the stories you write in the spring don't mean anything by the time fall camp starts -- so this is kind of my attempt to prioritize a little better and write more interesting stories.

Cancelled

I cancelled my season ticket renewal for football today. We have had tickets for over 20 years, but the NIL and Portal finally killed it for me. I will not renew basketball either. I will follow the Deacs, but more likely to go to see my Daughter;s DII alma mater on occasion, when feeling the need for live football or basketball.
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Baseball restart

Always feels like I'm dialed in to the preseason and early-season baseball coverage ... and it slacks off when basketball season hits tournament time.

So I wanted to thread together some links over the past couple of weeks as I've finished basketball season -- the games, at least, since the portal spins forward -- and dove into baseball (and spring football) season.

Feature on Jack Winnay.

Story on Wake's throttling of Coastal Carolina.

Weekend recap on Wake's sweep at VT.

I won't be in Boston this weekend, so it'll be a weekend recap of Wake's games up there. I'll have it updated every day as quickly as I can -- have a busy weekend, though.

And I'd be remiss if I didn't mention: The Orioles just got a sweep in Boston.

Duke-WF baseball series

Here's the recap of Sunday's game. There is also a brief recap of Saturday's game at the bottom.

Meant to post this thread going into the weekend with some thoughts in general and just ran out of time ... sometimes it really sucks feeling like I'm doing half as good a job as I could on two different sites. Oh well, that's a me problem and I'll try to figure it out.

My two cents: This WF has some things to figure out, too. As the story says -- I was thisclose to making it a My Take -- it's not that WF dropped a series. That was bound to happen. I can't remember if I actually wrote it anywhere to reference, but I know I told several people I thought they'd lose one of their first two ACC series.

It's the way this series was lost, the Sunday game, that sticks out like a sore thumb. The walks, careless errors in the field, wild pitches/passed balls ... it was all too familiar of what this team did a lot of in the years that weren't 2023. And Wake's offense isn't anywhere close to the 2022 level of being able to slug its way through games like that.

Now, it's one, one series. Against one of the best 3 or 4 teams in the ACC. It's barely mid-March and that's not when you press the panic button. But it's disheartening for a team to beat itself.
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Football Recruiting Class of 2024 recruiting

Going to get an early start on this one and try to do a better job of tracking guys before they're commits or on the verge.

Here's Landan Callahan, a 2024 DB, last Friday night against Grimsley HS. His team (Reagan, from Pfafftown) lost 40-34 and the game-winning touchdown came on a pass to the WR (Alex Taylor, P5 talent) he had been covering all game -- Callahan had to come off of the field for an injury, and Grimsley went right after his replacement. Video comes from Jacey Zembal, the publisher of the N.C. State site:

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