The now nationally popular Jake Dickert brings his now nationally popular Wake Forest Demon Deacons back home to face the Stanford Cardinal this weekend.
The 3-1 Deacs (1-1 in ACC play) host 2-2 Stanford (1-2 in conference play) Saturday at noon at Allegacy Stadium.
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After getting the team to refocus after the exhilarating 30-27 win at Louisville, Dickert still had a laundry list of things he needed to see his team improve upon this week. The biggest issue was finishing drives in the end zone. It is a luxury to have the consistency of a placekicker like Connor Calvert, who was three for three on field goals last week, enough to get him special recognition from the Lou Groza Award committee. Calvert is nine of 10 on the season and has not missed since the opening week.
But Dickert wants to see more of Calvert on extra points after touchdown drives and a little less on the field goals. The Deacs missed out on a touchdown opportunity deep in Louisville territory thanks to a penalty, and wound up “settling” for a Calvert field goal. “If we want to put away good opponents, we’ve got to finish down there,” Dickert said earlier this week. “Too many controllable penalties.”
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Wake Forest committed 10 penalties in Louisville, one more than their previous per-game average. The good news is some of them were only five-yard penalties, so the penalty yardage per game average dropped slightly. And other teams in the country got worse in the penalty category on the stats ledger, so Wake is now only tied for next to last in the country.
“Success can’t hide things that we need to work on,” Dickert said was the message to the team this week.
Dickert continued to praise the efforts and the results of Carlos Hernandez. He has gone from facing being benched last year to being a breakout star in this offense. He had nine catches for 194 yards, including a 77-yard touchdown with the game still very much hanging in the balance last week. Dickert said that when things go wrong, “Everyone wants to leave. It’s someone else’s fault. Pass the blame. Couldn’t be me. He’s just been the opposite.”
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Dickert said that Hernandez is also in a very good rhythm with quarterback Gio Lopez. The UNC transfer has spent the last couple of weeks hobbled by a banged-up hip that has limited his practice time. Dickert said that Lopez is now as healthy as he has been since the beginning of the season and was set to be a full participant in practice all week.
That gets the attention of Stanford head coach Tavita Pritchard. “One of the most impressive things to me is his ability to keep his eyes down the field,” Pritchard said of Lopez this week. “I think he’s elite at that. He’s also a phenomenal runner.”
Pritchard is in his first year as a head coach anywhere. He was quarterback at Stanford from 2006-2009. He has spent nearly all of his coaching career at Stanford. He held various assistant coach positions on the offensive side of the ball (while Dickert was the defensive coordinator at Pac-12 rival Washington State). He spent 2023-2025 as the quarterbacks coach with the Washington Commanders, working with Jayden Daniels, before returning to his alma mater this year as head coach.
His nearly 11 years working with quarterbacks have been a benefit to the current Cardinal signal-caller Davis Warren. He is in his sixth year of college ball, but his first at Stanford. He spent the previous years at Michigan, where he only saw action in nine games in 2024. He threw for 1,199 yards, seven touchdowns and nine interceptions. He tore his ACL in the 2024 Reliaquest Bowl and missed the entire 2025 season before transferring to Stanford.
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He has already thrown for over a thousand yards this season and has yet to throw an interception while passing for five touchdowns. He threw for almost 400 yards in a blowout win over Georgia Tech last weekend. “He’s one of the best pure pocket passers I’ve seen on tape in a long time,” Dickert said. “Schematically I think they do a really good job.”
Going into the fifth game of the season, the injury lists start to grow. Stanford defensive back Brandon Nicholson suffered a non-contact leg injury last week and is out for possibly the rest of the season. Starting linebacker Jahsiah Galvan is listed as questionable, suffering from nagging injuries all season.
For Wake Forest, defensive lineman Tyler Walton is listed as doubtful. And linebacker Deuce Dyce has been upgraded in the last 24 hours from being listed as questionable to probable. Missing either of these players would put a significant dent in the Deacs’ depth at those positions.
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This is the second time Stanford will have had to travel cross-country for a game this season. The Cardinal lost at Duke 35-7 in week three. But that game was at 4 p.m. Eastern Time, or 1 p.m. Stanford time. This will be a different wake-up call for Stanford, with kickoff set for 9 a.m. on the Cardinal body clocks.
Main Image: Chris Carter-Imagn Images
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