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WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. — The faded red clay of a brick smokestack shoots skyward amid an increasingly crowded airspace occupied by more modern conventions like think tanks and business accelerators.

Scrawled in faded white paint, you can still make out the wording from the windows of a 12th-floor office space in the center of town: “R.J.R. TOB. Co.”

Texas has oil. Kentucky has bourbon. North Carolina had tobacco.

The R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company has been associated with Winston-Salem since the 1870s, when its founder and namesake sought a railroad hub after selling his stake in his family’s business to go out on his own.

But as the tobacco business modernized and health hazards spiked its broader impact, reminders of this entrepreneurial spirit remain throughout town and, more specifically, around the football program donning black and gold that has been throttling opponents this fall.

“We’re kind of the talk of the college football world right now,” Bob McCreary, an 87-year-old furniture magnate and former Wake Forest football player who has been chief among the boosters bolstering the Demon Deacons amid a shifting landscape, told me. “What Jake (Dickert) has been able to do in two years (is incredible).”

McCreary isn’t the only one with the resources, relationships and conviction to help shape the program’s future.

Ben Sutton, a longtime influential board member and college sports industry veteran, slips into the head chair of a boardroom downtown, a pair of emerald green reading glasses hanging from his neck thanks to needle-pointed Wake Forest croakies.

Sutton is unassuming: another dime-a-dozen, quarter-zip-wearing executive in a town where the style is as normal as any other mid-sized financial hub across the South.

Don’t let it fool you.

Sutton is a giant here in Winston-Salem and across the college sports industry, the founder of ISP Sports, which has since evolved into Learfield — the largest and most significant multimedia rights provider in the industry.

But before all that, before cashing in on an industry at a crossroads, Sutton was just a poor kid from rural Murfreesboro, North Carolina, arriving at the school whose famed steeple rises just above the skyline outside his office window.

“Wake Forest,” he told me through a deep North Carolinian drawl, “changed my life.”

This private school of just more than 5,500 undergrads — the smallest of any Power Four school — sits second in the ACC standings and No. 13 in the College Football Playoff rankings. Its only loss was a competitive one to previously No. 1 Miami.

That the Demon Deacons are in this position requires bowing your neck, tilting your head and squinting a touch to fully believe.

But there’s an intrepid spirit around these parts; a feeling rooted in Winston-Salem’s once world-renowned industrial roots that have since shifted toward more modern means of production.

The story of Wake Forest, its steady rise on the football field under Dickert and the donors who’ve helped bankroll his roster, is as much a parallel to that of the city it occupies.

Time could’ve forgotten this place, this school and this football program. It hasn’t.

Its effervescent, Midwest-born head coach and engaged booster base are determined to keep the Demon Deacons relevant — and they suggest you start paying attention.

“This is a place,” Wake Forest athletics director John Currie told me, “where people win.” 

The Small Towns That Forged Wake Forest’s Head Coach

Guzzling down a Miller Lite with his father, Jeff Dickert, a 20-something-year-old Jake commiserated with his old man over his potential future in teaching and what life might bring.

Jeff was supportive. He’d spent decades in education, including serving as superintendent of the Oconto School District, while also coaching football. Jake figured he’d take a similar path, having accepted a job teaching sixth-grade math at Hartford Middle School.

But Jeff had one more thought.

“You should try college coaching,” he encouraged at the time. “It’s my one regret. You should try it before you know what money is, because you’ll never go back once you start working.”

Jake called up his old college coach at Wisconsin-Stevens Point, a Division III school almost two hours north of Madison and begged for a job. Nothing was available on offense for the former receiver, but they had an opening for a graduate assistant on defense. Jake jumped at it.

From there, Dickert’s career took him on a winding journey through 12 jobs in 18 years, with stops at places like Southeast Missouri State, Augustana and Minnesota State. There was time, too, spent with FCS superpowers North Dakota State and South Dakota State before leaping into the FBS under former North Dakota State head coach Craig Bohl at Wyoming.

Dickert landed his first head coaching job as the interim at Washington State, where he’d been hired as the defensive coordinator before head coach Nick Rolovich was fired for refusing to be administered the COVID-19 vaccine.

Naturally, Dickert was welcomed into the job he’d earned under wonky circumstances by the complete implosion of the Pac-12 and a roster that was pilfered year over year.

He watched his locker room struggle through the school’s uncertain future — his final season marked by the highs of an upset win over Washington in the Apple Cup and an 8-1 start that was soured by losing the final four games of the year.

The window was there to move. Dickert knew it. If he were to make the leap to a Power Four program, he needed to do so, pronto.

“I’m just gonna call a spade a spade; we knew it was time to make a change,” he told me. “Then it was like the slowest cycle of Power Four coaching transitions in history.”

The trip to Seattle wasn’t designed as a covert mission, per se. It simply evolved into one.

Sutton flew out to Washington in the fall of 2024 to attend the Apple Cup between cross-state rivals, given he had business with both schools.

Standing along the sidelines, he watched with growing interest as the Cougars tripped up the school that functionally helped dissolve the Pac-12 and sent Washington State into the realignment abyss.

The afternoon was cathartic for those in Pullman. The Pac-12 collapse. The firing of a football coach. The lingering question of where Washington State might find a home.

It all spilled into the open.

Dickert posed for pictures postgame along the sidelines, where one fan even handed him his newborn for a quick shot.

Chomping on a cigar in the postgame press conference, he loudly asked, “Who’s got a lighter?!” hoping any of the gathered scribes could help fire up the stogie.

Sutton filed all of it away.

“You’d be hard-pressed to find more than two or three people in America that are on more college campuses a year than I am,” Sutton explained. ” … One of the things I look at is an esprit de corps/culture, how people are bonded together and discipline.

“The thing that I noticed about Jake’s sideline was that his team had an unwavering belief that lil’ old Washington State was going to beat the University of Washington that day.”

The Modernization Of Wake Forest’s Athletics Facilities

The Keurig machine clacks open as Jake Dickert fixes a mid-morning cup of joe before nestling into the cozy living room seating arrangement that overlooks Wake Forest’s practice fields.

Dickert is an early riser, often headed to the office before dawn. But in the earliest days of his tenure, Currie would beat him to the punch.

“He’d call me at like 5 a.m. every morning to check in,” Dickert told me through a grin.

Currie and Wake Forest’s senior-most stakeholders have been at the heart of the progress around these parts. 

Gathered in the football stadium for a meeting of Wake Forest’s most significant stakeholders around 2015, Sutton and McCreary called for a pause to the discussions and exited the room.

Wake Forest needed a revamp of its football facilities. Desperately. 

Sutton and McCreary had long been athletically minded. They understood the desire for an indoor practice facility and, eventually, a football operations center.

So there in the hallway they agreed to front the first $10 million for the projects — $5 million each. The rest followed in short order.

“Years ago, I remember (athletics director) Mike Holder at Oklahoma State said that T. Boone Pickens was afraid that if he made this big gift, nobody else would give anything,” Currie said. “What actually happened is he made the big gift, which gave people belief, and they raised more money than they ever had before.

“The same thing has happened at Wake Forest.”

Financial pressures on collegiate athletic departments have only grown in recent years. Facilities remain crucial, while football roster costs have skyrocketed past $50 million.

Wake Forest is not spending that. Not close.

“Lower third,” Dickert said, smiling, when asked where his roster spending ranks in the ACC.

Still, the school has come a long way since the advent of NIL.

Dave Clawson built off the highs of the Jim Grobe era in the late 2000s, guiding Wake Forest to bowl games in seven straight years through a developmental approach. It was a model of consistency. Until it wasn’t.

Clawson’s final two years were marred by 4-8 seasons as the school struggled to adapt to a changing landscape — a reality almost everyone associated with Wake Forest will readily admit. 

“Those last two years there, we really weren’t prepared for NIL,” Clawson told me. “We lost a lot of players because of a lack of NIL. It was just good timing when I left with the start of revenue share to bring in someone new, and Jake and his staff have done a great job of building a program using the portal, using revenue share, using NIL.

“We had a couple not good years competing against people that had a lot of NIL money,” McCreary diagnosed succinctly. “The support, we were lacking.”

Clawson resigned as the head coach at Wake Forest on Dec. 16, 2024. 

Dickert was officially hired two days later. A four-hour phone call with his predecessor sold him.

“It’s just the nature of college football,” Clawson said. “Jim Grobe did a phenomenal job and won with good kids and hardly any facilities. My whole charge when I got here (was) we had to have facilities. Like, you can’t tell people football is important. At some point, you have to show it.

“… When Jake came here, we had the facilities. The facilities are great. (I told him), ‘Make sure you get enough NIL and revenue share to allow yourself to be competitive. If you can do that, it’s a good job.’”

“Coach to coach, there’s something where you feel like you’re not getting sold a bag of goods,” Dickert added. “It started there.”

Wake Forest won’t soon be spending with the ultra-boosters of the college football world, but the school is committed to increasing its efforts, and ample measures designed to help offset those costs are already in play.

The school is neck-deep in a redevelopment project around its football stadium dubbed “The Grounds” — a mixed-use space designed to connect the football stadium and campus, while generating millions through new entertainment options for fans on game days and otherwise.

Currie declined to share any exact projections on what the ground leases and revenue-sharing structure between tenants and the school might generate when it opens next fall, but noted The Grounds are expected to have a $1.2 billion economic impact over the next decade.

The school’s athletically minded boosters, too, are determined to keep the Demon Deacons relevant.

“I support Wake Forest, but I support individuals as much as I do an institution,” said McCreary, who has given tens of millions to the school over the years. “That’s why I supported Dave Clawson — he was the reason I gave what I did.

“I met with Jake; he’d only been there barely two weeks when I had my first meeting with him. I had an open mind. I said, ‘You know, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to do for this guy what I did for Dave and everything else because I’ve got to know the person.’ 

“Fifty minutes into our conversation, I said, ‘You’re the man.’”

Why Jake Dickert Can Win In Winston-Salem

Glancing over the brim of his glasses, Sutton shifted upright. There was a tale to tell.

“It’s a great story,” he said, smirking.

The former GMAC building — which houses Sutton’s most recent business ventures — was purchased over the last decade by former Wake Forest board chair Don Flow, an ex-Virginia football player who completed his graduate school work in town.

Flow, whose self-named company owns and operates dozens of automotive dealerships in North Carolina and Virginia, saw the building that sat empty for the better part of five years in the heart of Winston-Salem as an opportunity. 

It has since become his headquarters and serves as an incubator and accelerator program for entrepreneurs taking advantage of the area’s resources in hopes of scaling their respective businesses.

“With all due respect to the people that came before, this was a company town — Haynes, Wachovia Bank, Reynolds Tobacco,” Sutton told me. “We’ve evolved from that into a city that’s more about education, medicine, technology, etc.

“And Wake Forest has led that revolution.”

Sutton is a pioneer, an industry titan. But at his core, he remains the humble kid who arrived on Wake Forest’s campus that came from little means.

McCreary is the same, a product of a home that no longer stands back in the “holler” in Caldwell County, North Carolina, that lacked running water and indoor plumbing.

Dickert isn’t all that different: a child of small-town Wisconsin who has spent most of his career in the more remote outposts college football has to offer.

That marriage has Wake Forest sitting at 8-1 heading into a road trip to SMU this week. Win in Dallas and the Demon Deacons should be favored in their final two contests.

Albeit, how long Dickert might remain in Winston-Salem has become popular column fodder.

Extension discussions are ongoing, though school officials declined to specify further. The expectation is that Dickert will have significantly more financial resources to retain his staff and expand his NIL budget, though exact details are likely to be finalized in the coming weeks.

“They know exactly where I sit,” Dickert said when asked about the talks. “I want to be here. I want to be here with these coaches and these players. To me, they’re the priority, not me. Once that’s done, we’re good. 

“I’ve learned, like 10 years ago, I was making $60,000. Some people are so broke, all they have is money.”

Still, his name is everywhere. 

Dickert has been listed on hot boards from Tallahassee to Waco. He knows the attention is there. He experienced it after breaking through at Washington State.

Asked more directly why he believes he can keep winning at Wake Forest despite inherent economic disadvantages that might suggest otherwise, Dickert was frank.

He looks at college football on two tracks — “The corporation of college football,” as he characterizes the biggest spenders, and a lane just below that where he suggests Wake Forest resides. An expansion of the College Football Playoff to 24 teams only helps the school’s positioning.

“We didn’t come here to leave,” Dickert said resolutely. “I say that really honestly and truthfully. … There’s this lane that we can be really successful in. I just say we can’t be sputtering in this lane. We can’t be walking in this lane. We have to be sprinting in this lane, and I believe we can do that — and I believe with the expanded playoffs, there can be a lot of opportunity here.”

Now, in what is officially the final year of the 12-team playoff, Wake Forest is in prime position for a berth in a more selective field. 

That’s a story R.J. Reynolds could roll up and smoke.