The Story
Picked Dead Last.
Finished First.
In 1970, Wake Forest football entered the season with ten straight losing years behind it. Sportswriters predicted more of the same. The new coach, Cal Stoll, had one mission: transform perennial losers into champions. The price was brutal conditioning designed to break them. Most quit. The ones who stayed would face a season where everything that could go wrong did — until it didn’t.
The team started 0–3. A sportswriter called them “the best no-win team in the country.” Then they finished 5–1 in the ACC and 6–5 overall, claiming Wake Forest’s first-ever ACC football championship.
But this isn’t just a football story. It’s about a year when Kent State burned and the draft lottery determined who would go to Vietnam. It’s about racism, loss, a pioneering female sportswriter, and young men who refused to accept impossible.
Written by David D. Doda, Ph.D. — a tight end on that 1970 championship team — this is the story of how an old-school coach transformed perennial underdogs, and what it cost the boys who became men along the way.
