Dave Clawson on WakeyLeaks: "I viewed this as a Wake Forest problem"

Wake Forest football coach Dave Clawson appeared on ESPN's "Mike and Mike" program this morning to discuss the ever-unfolding WakeyLeaks saga, and said .... well, sort of what U of L said from the get-go.

Clawson said he wasn't interested in talking about Louisville or any other program.

"Our goal in this wasn't to implicate other people," he said. "From the second this happened, I viewed this as a Wake Forest problem, that we had somebody that had intimate knowledge of our program, detailed knowledge of our game plans, that was sharing that information. We had to stop that from happening. How other people handled this information is their business, and they've bot to make decisions based on what they feel is appropriate or not appropriate."

Clawson acknowledged that coaches are always looking for an edge. But he said he'd never heard of a situation like this one, with a guy who was inside the program, a former assistant coach and player at the school who was at practice, in video sessions, team meetings and other events, peddling detailed information to opponents.

"This type of level of betrayal I've never seen before," he said. "It's hard to imagine somebody on the inside — there's third-party stuff that happens frequently. If team A played Team B and now Team A is going to play Team C and Team C has a friend on Team B, I think it's normal for those things to help. But to have somebody on the inside of a program that should be invested in the success of that program giving information to somebody that they're playing, is just, again, unheard of."

Clawson also discussed how Wake stumbled upon the fact that they had been breached.

Clawson said the information was found on cards that were "just laying on our sideline" when the equipment staff arrived a day prior to the game to set up the visiting locker room.

The equipment manager, Clawson said, didn't think much of it, and sat the cards aside until the next day, when he handed them to Wake Forest's offensive coordinator and told him where they'd been found. Clawson said the equipment manager told the coach he didn't think they were any big deal, just a lot of plays Wake Forest runs normally. But it turned out to be more than that.

"Our coordinator flipped through it and there was very, very detailed information there," Clawson said. "Formations that we had never run, alignments, even some of it was even some empty sets that we had never run before, but some of it was even sets we had run but we had flipped personnel. Louisville is an excellent football team, and it was a game that we felt, in order to score points, we had to have some wrinkles in. And all of those wrinkles were right in front of us."

You can read Eric Crawford's full review of Clawson's interview here.