Wake Forest’s basketball season arrives today with a rare double dose, as the women open first against USC Upstate at 5:00 PM and the men follow against Maryland Eastern Shore at 8:00 PM.
For plenty of fans, the start of hoops may have crept up fast. Football’s success has dominated the conversation, and neither basketball team is carrying the kind of preseason buzz that usually makes the calendar turn feel more urgent. Still, the new season brings a clear sense that both programs are at a crossroads.
The men are coming off their worst season since Steve Forbes arrived as head coach in 2020, while the women have failed to reach five conference wins in each of the last three seasons. That’s a thin return for two programs that have combined for just one NCAA Tournament appearance in the last 15 years, and both of those trips ended in the first round.
The bigger issue goes beyond wins and losses. In a college sports landscape that keeps shifting, Wake Forest risks falling into irrelevance in a sport that used to be one of the school’s calling cards.
Roster building has become part of the problem. CBS Sports reported that the average cost of an ACC men’s roster is nearly $12 million this season, with Louisville, UNC and Duke all spending more than $20 million.
Miami, SMU, Pitt and UVA are over $12 million, while Syracuse, State and Clemson are above $10 million. Wake Forest, by comparison, is reportedly working with just $5-7 million, placing the Deacs in the lowest tier among major conference teams.
If the men are operating at less than half of what they need to compete, it’s not much of a stretch to think the women are facing similar limitations. The offseason departures of the teams’ leading scorers only sharpened that reality: Juke Harris, who averaged 21.4 points per game, transferred to Tennessee, and Grace Oliver, who put up 14.3 points per game, left for Boston College.
That leaves Steve Forbes under pressure after six seasons without an NCAA Tournament berth. But the financial gap is so wide that changing coaches alone may not solve much. Wake Forest is simply being asked to compete with less than many of its peers.
The women’s program has its own long history of struggle. Wake Forest has reached the NCAA Tournament only twice, and the Deacs have finished above .500 just five times in the last 25 years. That’s not good enough, but it also makes it difficult to pin everything on Gebbia in a job that has always been a tough one.
So today’s opener is about more than just getting the season started. It feels like a first look at where both programs are headed. Without major changes across the board, what fans see on the floor this year may be what they’re looking at for a while.