Mauk Decides Not To Return For 2007 Season
Feb. 1, 2007
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. - Quarterback Ben Mauk has opted to complete his undergraduate requirements at Wake Forest this spring and pursue a Master's degree at another school next fall.
Mauk has told the Wake Forest coaching staff that he plans to have a career in education as a teacher or coach and will attend a school that offers an advanced degree in education administration. Wake Forest does not offer that degree.
Mauk was Wake Forest's starting quarterback in 2006 until suffering a dislocated shoulder and right arm in the team's season-opening win against Syracuse. He underwent two surgeries at Wake Forest University Baptist Medical Center this fall to repair and stabilize his arm and shoulder.
- from www.wakeforestsports.com
Mauk's first pass as a Deacon was an 85-yard touchdown to Jason Anderson in the 2004 season opener at Clemson. I remember watching that game on TV and saying, Thus starts the legend of Ben Mauk.
Even at that time, about 60% of that comment was meant to be sarcastic. Mauk had come to Wake holding all sorts of high school passing records in Ohio. No Deacon football recruit had been as heralded - and no recruit had faced such ridiculous expectations - since C.J. Leak, and we all remember how Leak turned out. But Deacon fans had been clamoring for Mauk since his signing, even though Cory Randolph had done nothing to deserve a benching. It's a football truism that the most popular player on most teams is the second-string quarterback. That's especially true when he's a young and ballyhooed player on a struggling team - and by struggling team, I mean a team that hasn't beaten every opponent by at least three touchdowns. C.J.'s little brother Chris led Florida to the national title this past season, but Gator fans spent most of the year calling for freshman QB Tim Tebow.
(I will point out, but will not comment on, the fact that both Chris Leak and Cory Randolph are black, while Tebow and Mauk are white.)
Such are the demands of college football fans.
So Mauk came in against Clemson and began his Wake Forest career with an 85-yard touchdown pass in possibly the most hostile venue in the ACC. What sometimes got lost was that most of those 80 yards came from running after the catch by the all-conference Anderson, who had had to turn around and wait for the weak floater that Mauk had thrown him.
Mauk and Randolph ended up sharing the position on a game-to-game, sometimes possession-to-possession rotation, a move that did no favors for the rhythm or confidence of either one. It may be the only serious mistake Grobe has made since he came to Wake. Randolph, a competent but not spectacular passer, seemed to lose every bit of his nerve knowing that he could come out of the game at any time. Mauk never seemed to acclimate himself to the pace of the major-college game; he held the ball too long on almost every snap, was too prone to declare a play broken and take off running, and often failed to put enough zip on his passes to get them to his receivers before the defense converged.
This past year he got Wally Pipp-ed* in the most painful way possible. In the season opener against Syracuse, he dove for a loose ball and ended up with his right arm buried and crushed under two Orangemen defenders. While they wheeled him off the field on a cart, Mauk pumped his left fist - on the end of his only working arm - to the Deacon crowd, some of whom were almost in tears because they had no idea who the Deacs had to replace Mauk. The Groves Stadium crowd cheered, and cheered loudly, Mauk's display of spirit.
It turned out, of course, that the Deacons had Riley Skinner to come in for Mauk, and all Skinner did was lead the Deacons to their first ACC title since 1970 (that was two years before I was born, so I'm not even going to calculate how long that was before Skinner was born) and win ACC Rookie of the Year in the process. A few newspapers "reported" on the possibility of a QB controversy for the Deacs when Mauk got healthy, but anyone who really follows the team knew that the job was Skinner's to lose. Skinner would have had to collapse in the most monumental way to give up his starting position. If Mauk had started in Skinner's place, the first interception, the first fumble, the first sack because he held the ball too long, would have been met by the most savage boo's a Wake Forest crowd could muster. They'd have wanted Skinner, the hero of 2006.
If Mauk never lived up to the expectations - expectations that were probably unrealistic from the get-go - at least say this for him: nobody, no player in my memory of Wake Forest football, played with more heart than Ben Mauk. He never threw a pass that got more cheers than the bravehearted blocks he threw to spring his runners, or the times he put his head down and took on a linebacker or safety on a quarterback keeper. He gave up his job - and, it turns out, his career - by giving up his body to recover a fumble (I wrote about the guts he showed on that play in an early Deaconball post, "Wake 20, Syracuse 10," on 9/7/06) in a tie game.
When I lived in Charlotte I listened to a Wake football pre-game show on the radio while they ran down the top passers in Deacon history. I listened to the roll call of names - Jay Venuto, Gary Schofield, Keith West, Mike Elkins, Phil Barnhill - that once had occupied a ridiculously large percentage of my thought and emotion. For a season - for two or three seasons - I lived and died with how these guys played each Saturday. Then, after their last season, I usually all but forgot them. I concentrated all that expectation, all that hope and despair, on the next guy to step under center.
Maybe Mauk never turned into the quarterback Deacon fans thought he would be, or expected him to be, or hoped he would be. Blame him for that if you hold your standards to excellence and nothing but. Forget about him and give all your love to Riley Skinner for another year, another two, until Skinner makes a mistake you find inexcusable and you start hollering for Brett Hodges to come off the bench.
I think we should thank Mauk, like we should thank every Deacon player, for giving Wake Forest football everything he could in a career that was confused and cut short. We buy our tickets, come to the games, stand (maybe) and cheer. We give up some of our money and varying measures of devotion. Mauk gave up the right arm that had made him the best quarterback in his home state, the right arm that had gotten him a college scholarship, the right arm that had carried the expectations of Deacon fans for three years. He deserves our best wishes.
* Wally Pipp was the starting first basemen for the New York Yankees, until he took a game off because of an illness. His replacement was Lou Gehrig.
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