COLLEGE FOOTBALL WEEK NINE:
Wake Forest, Satterfield, Tailbacks Quartet
Among DG’s ACC/NC “Fun Facts & Shout-Outs”
(Weekly Video = Posted At Bottom)
By David Glenn
North Carolina Sports Network
(last updated Oct. 28, 2025)
While the focus of our “This Week In College Football” show is forward-looking as often as possible, we always take a glance back at the previous weekend in college football, too, and sometimes we’ll offer some quick mentions to those making impactful headlines on the gridiron, especially in the Atlantic Coast Conference and/or across North Carolina.
With that in mind, below are our Week Nine “Fun Facts and Shout-Outs,” brought to you by our good friends at Jimmy’s bar and King Neptune restaurant in Wrightsville Beach.
Jimmy’s has a full bar, nightly drink specials and live music 365 days a year(!). (It’s a great place to watch a game, too.) Right next door, King Neptune has become one of the best restaurants in the entire greater Wilmington area.
Week Nine “Fun Fact #1″
Fun Fact: Placekicking has gotten a lot better at the college level just in the past decade, such that — in 2024 — Football Bowl Subdivision (FBS) kickers converted more than half of their attempts from 50 yards or longer for the first time in history.
As recently as 2016, that long-distance conversion rate at the FBS level was barely 40 percent, compared to about 73 percent in the National Football League.
Now the gap is closing a bit, with FBS kickers converting 54 percent of their kicks from 50 yards or longer last season, and that upward trend has continued. Overall this season, more than 70 FBS kickers have converted at least once from 50 yards or more.
However, last Saturday, when Wake Forest coach Jake Dickert asked his kicker, redshirt freshman walk-on Connor Calvert, to boot a 50-yarder — with the game on the line, as time was expiring in the fourth quarter, against SMU, in a game the Demon Deacons were trailing 12-10 — he was asking for the longest successful field goal by any of the kickers at North Carolina’s seven FBS programs in the entire 2025 season.
In fact, Dickert even was asking Calvert to convert the longest field goal of his entire life, at least under actual game circumstances.
Calvert, who followed Dickert to Wake Forest from Washington State, was primarily a soccer player until his junior year at Mountain View High School in Oregon. Calvert’s high school coach rarely asked him to attempt anything longer than 40 yards, then the kicker redshirted at Washington State last season. During his relatively brief Wake Forest career, Calvert did have two field goal attempts from 54 yards — including one earlier in the SMU game – but he had missed both of them.
This time, of course, with the game on the line and as the clock hit zeroes, Calvert converted from 50 yards to beat the Mustangs on the final play of the game, picking a great time for the best kick of his entire young life.
More on this wild Wake Forest story in a bit…
Week Nine “Fun Fact #2″
Fun Fact: Four of the top six running backs in the ACC are connected in various ways to the great state of North Carolina, and they’re all legitimate All-ACC candidates.
At NC State, redshirt sophomore Hollywood Smothers leads the ACC and ranks 10th nationally with 103 rushing yards per game. A product of West Charlotte High School, he’s in his second season with the Wolfpack, after redshirting the 2023 campaign at Oklahoma, and he was among the stars in both of his team’s biggest wins earlier this year. When the Pack handed Virginia what is still the Cavaliers’ only loss so far this season, Smothers carried 17 times for 140 yards and two touchdowns, including what turned out to be the game-winning score late in the third quarter. Against a very strong Wake Forest defense, Smothers had 24 carries for 164 yards in the Pack’s 34-24 victory in Winston-Salem.
Speaking of Wake Forest, senior Demond Claiborne is third among ACC running backs, with 87 rushing yards per game and eight touchdowns on the ground. Claiborne, who is considered by many one of the top five running back prospects for the 2026 NFL draft, has gone over the 100-yard rushing mark three times this season — against Western Carolina, Georgia Tech and Oregon State.
The other two top ACC running backs with ties to the Bold North State are Virginia’s sixth-year senior J’Mari Taylor and Duke’s true freshman Nate Sheppard.
Formerly of NC Central, an FCS program located in Durham, Taylor is averaging 73 rushing yards per game and has scored nine touchdowns (that TD number is second-best in the ACC) for the 7-1 and nationally ranked Cavaliers. He starred at West Mecklenburg High School in Charlotte before spending four and a half years at NC Central, where last season his 1,146 rushing yards marked the fourth-highest single-season total in the history of that program.
Last but not least, Sheppard is averaging 71 yards per game and a whopping seven yards per carry for Duke. In addition to being an All-ACC candidate, Sheppard is among the top options for the league’s Offensive Rookie of the Year honor.
Now on to this week’s shout-outs, which include coaches connected to (in various ways) Appalachian State, Cincinnati and Wake Forest.
#1—Shout-out to former Appalachian State head coach Scott Satterfield, the guy who led the Mountaineers through their successful transition from the FCS to the FBS a little more than a decade ago.
“Coach Satt” averaged 10 victories over his final four seasons at App State, his alma mater, and led that program to three straight Sun Belt Conference championships in 2016, 2017 and 2018. He left Boone to take the Louisville job in the ACC, but after four mediocre seasons with the Cardinals, he resigned and jumped straight to the head coaching job at Cincinnati in 2023, just as the Bearcats were joining the Big 12 Conference.
After an alarmingly slow start — 3-9 two years ago, then 5-7 last season — Satterfield has Cincinnati 7-1 this season and ranked #17 nationally.
A former App State quarterback, and an offensive coordinator before he became a head coach, Satterfield has the Bearcats averaging 38 points per game, which ranks third in the Big 12. His dual-threat quarterback, Indiana transfer Brendan Sorsby, is a redshirt junior who ranks third in the conference with 284 yards of total offense per game and has thrown 20 touchdown passes against only one interception.
One post-script to this shout-out: Cincinnati’s three toughest games of the regular season are all November games — at #24 Utah this Saturday (that’s the late-night game on ESPN this week), then later on at home against #10 BYU and on the road against TCU to close the regular season.
If Satterfield can win two of those three very difficult games, this will rank as one of the best seasons of his entire coaching career. If he somehow wins out in the regular season, he’ll be 11-1, 8-0 in conference play and on his way to the Big 12 championship game, with a great chance of making the College Football Playoff.
#2—Finally, we’ll circle back to where we started, at Wake Forest, with a shout-out to first-year Demon Deacons head coach Jake Dickert.
It is truly extraordinary to figure out a way to be 5-2 — and, remember, an officiating gaffe against Georgia Tech away from being 6-1 — given the circumstances and details of his initial season in Winston-Salem as the successor to the universally respected Dave Clawson.
Among the 136 FBS teams, Wake’s offense ranks just 113th, and the Demon Deacons don’t have an above-average quarterback on the entire roster. The Deacs’ special teams, meanwhile, rank 101st. Yet they have been competitive and well-coached in every game.
Wake’s uncommon combination of brilliant execution on defense — shout-out, again, to defensive coordinator Scottie Hazelton — relentless perseverance through adversity and simply believing — in their coaches and in each other, even when things look bleak — is a testament to great coaching, intelligent players and a very strong culture.
In its opening game this season, Dickert’s debut, Wake actually trailed Kennesaw State — Kennesaw State! — 9-7 late in the third quarter. Even with Claiborne injured and the offense struggling badly, the Deacons figured out a way to win that game 10-9. When they later lost back-to-back home games to NC State and Georgia Tech, they didn’t flinch, didn’t panic, and nobody pointed fingers. They stuck to the plan, got better and kept believing.
Now Wake has a three-game winning streak, with the above-described 13-12 victory over SMU the best of the bunch.
The Mustangs are talented and well-coached. Trailing 12-10 with about five minutes to go, Wake put together a 60-yard drive that put the Deacons at SMU’s six-yard line with less than two minutes remaining. Then, Wake’s best player, Claiborne, fumbled the ball away, a shocking moment that would have absolutely deflated many teams.
Instead, after SMU took over with 1:40 remaining, and with Wake having only one timeout remaining, still nobody flinched. The defense forced a three-and-out, with sixth-year senior safety Nick Andersen and fifth-year senior linebacker Dylan Hazen combining on a game-saving third-down tackle, but even then things still looked bleak for the Deacs.
After the ensuing punt, Wake was at its own 42-yard line with only 12 seconds remaining, no timeouts and its backup quarterback — sophomore Deshawn Purdie, a Charlotte transfer — subbing for injured starter Robby Ashford. With a blitzing linebacker bearing down on him, Purdie threw an awkward-looking pass down the right sideline, where there were two SMU defenders next to backup tight end Kamrean Johnson, a Vanderbilt transfer who had dropped a would-be touchdown pass earlier and who also was in the game only because of an injury to the starter.
When it mattered most, Wake’s backup QB (under pressure) hit its backup tight end (between two defenders) to set up the extremely unlikely game-winning, 50-yard field goal from the redshirt freshman walk-on kicker, who — of course — hit it, but by such a tiny margin that the SMU coaches asked for a replay just to make sure it had cleared the crossbar.
It all added up to a crazy, extremely unlikely combination, but the Deacs were 5-2 as they took off on their big trip to Tallahassee.
