Wake Forest Buries Merrimack 77-0
Eleven scoring plays, eleven Wake Forest touchdowns, zero points for Merrimack. Wake Forest won 77-0 and the only thing that went sideways was a pair of two-point tries that did not all work out (one failed, one converted).
The Demon Deacons scored in every way a team can. Ty Clark III ran one in from a yard out to open it, Steele Pizzella threw to Carlos Hernandez for 38 and 9 yards in the first quarter, and by halftime it was 49-0. Pizzella added a 30-yard pass to Kam Shanks and a 13-yard touchdown run of his own before the break. The second half was more of the same with different delivery: Drayden Dickmann caught an 87-yard touchdown from Gannon Jones, Shanks took a punt back 79 yards, and Joshua Patterson returned an interception 98 yards for a 70-0 lead. Ryan Henley's 1-yard run closed it at 1:29.
The team numbers are silly. Wake Forest piled up 731 total yards, 546 through the air and 185 on 27 rushes, without a single interception or fumble lost, and its defense picked up a sack. Two of the eleven touchdowns (Shanks's punt return and Patterson's pick-six) did not even need the offense.
The Deacons are 8-1 after this one. Merrimack is 0-2 after a Saturday it will want to forget.
Fantasy managers who owned Pizzella got 47.6 points out of a quarterback who had averaged 5 over his previous three games. Take a bow, but do not bank on it again, because his season total before this game was a modest 16 points.