When the new coaching staff arrived at Wake Forest, they began their evaluation of the program with strength tests. The numbers, Dave Clawson said, were not encouraging.

Clawson had coached at all levels of football, but what he found at Wake Forest was some of the worst results of strength tests he’d seen, and before he’d ever run a practice with the Demon Deacons, he knew there would be problems offensively.

“Our strength numbers were not anywhere close to what a Division I football team should be, let alone an ACC team,” Clawson said. “Those are things that take time. You’re not going to go from bad strength levels to good strength levels in six months.”

The numbers did get better as the 2014 season went along, and so did Wake Forest’s overall performance. But the hole Clawson had to dig his program out of was a deep one, and the results on the field underscored just how far the Deacons had to go.

The story of Wake Forest’s season can be summed up pretty easily with two numbers.

The first is 48 --the number of sacks the Deacons allowed this season, most in the nation. Freshman QB John Wolford was on the receiving end of 45 of those sacks (again, tops in the nation). It was virtually impossible to sustain drives when Wolford was so often a sitting duck.

The second is 2.47, or the average yards per carry on non-sack runs for Wake’s offense. It was by far the worst rate in the nation, with no other Power 5 team within a yard of Wake’s woeful tally.

Thirty-five percent of Wake Forest’s runs went for a loss, and no other team in the country was within 30 TFLs of the Deacons’ season total of 127.

In other words, the line of scrimmage was a disaster.

“We were overwhelmed at the line of scrimmage all year long,” Clawson said, “and we combined that with using six freshmen at the skill positions.”

That Wake Forest would be physically overmatched all season offensively was no surprise. But what was encouraging for Clawson in Year 1 was that the Deacons never played like they expected to be overwhelmed.

The line struggled, but Clawson saw the unit continue to work.

Those freshmen made mistakes, but Clawson saw several of them develop into capable football players.

Wolford took a beating, but Clawson saw a quarterback who remained poised in the pocket and improved as the year went along.

“He got better, and if anything, he showed he had courage and guts and was willing to step into the pocket,” Clawson said. “He took a lot of hits and had a lot of sacks and he continued to play hard. He didn’t play like a quarterback that got hit a lot. You didn’t see him throw off his back foot or react to a phantom rush.”

There are more numbers that showed Wake’s limitations -- that until the season finale, every point the Deacons scored was by a player who’d never scored before this season or that in that final game of the year, Clawson dressed just 48 scholarship players. But those are excuses, and Clawson said no one inside Wake’s locker room was interested in that.

“You never finish the year 3-9 and say it was a good year,” Clawson said. “Our standards are higher and our expectations are higher, but if this is the effort and intensity we play with, as we get stronger and recruit talent, that’s a great foundation.”

And that foundation did develop throughout the year.

Wake won just three games, but it was on the wrong end of a blowout just three times, too -- a relatively amazing stat considering the dearth of talent on the roster.

“We probably stayed in games against teams that were a lot more talented than us because we did play hard,” Clawson said.

The team continued to fight, even late in the season. A 6-3 win over Virginia Tech in the penultimate game of the year represented a high point defensively for the Deacons. A 41-21 loss to Duke in the finale was perhaps Wake’s best offensive performance.

It’s a reason to be encouraged, and that alone is progress at Wake Forest.

Clawson expects a young team again next year -- maybe younger than 2014 -- and those strength numbers still have a ways to go. The defense that kept Wake in a lot of games will lose two quality cornerbacks, and the schedule for 2015 won’t get much easier.

But the good news is that Clawson didn’t have to look that hard to find building blocks this year. The final project may still be a ways off, but this was a team that clearly knows the finish line exists. That’s encouraging.

“The one thing you always want your team to do was play hard, and people who watched us play knew we gave great effort,” Clawson said. “Now we’ve got to develop players and upgrade the talent level.”