77–0 Is Not Even Close

Wake Forest scored 77 points on Saturday night in Winston-Salem. Eleven touchdowns, a shutout, the biggest scoring day in the program's modern era — in a game its backup quarterback started and was done playing by halftime. And here is the part that turns 77–0 from a record into a history lesson: it is not even close. The record is 222.

The starter never took a snap. Gio Lopez sat with the right knee he hurt last week against Virginia, according to the Associated Press, so the No. 14 team in the AP poll handed its offense to Steele Pizzella, a sophomore from Simi Valley making the first start of his career. Pizzella completed 23 of 28 passes for 432 yards and three touchdowns, ran for 63 yards and another score — all of it in the first half. His 495 yards of offense finished, by Wake Forest Athletics' own recap, 15 yards shy of the NCAA record for a single half. It was the first 400-yard passing day by a Wake Forest quarterback since Hank Bachmeier's 403 against Virginia in 2024.

The parade never slowed down. Ty Clark III opened the scoring, Pizzella hit Carlos Hernandez for touchdowns of 38 and 9 yards — the second capping a 96-yard drive — and it was 20–0 after one quarter. Jamar Searcy, Drayden Dickmann and Kam Shanks scored in the second, Pizzella closed his night with a 13-yard touchdown run, and the half ended 49–0. The second half belonged to the depth chart, and the depth chart kept scoring: Gannon Jones found Dickmann for 87 yards, Shanks returned a punt 79 yards, Joshua Patterson took an interception back 98, and Ryan Henley scored the last one. Wake Forest finished with 730 yards — four shy of the school record — its first shutout since 2015, a sixth straight win at 8–1, and the second-largest margin of victory in program history. Every scoring play is in the Game Center.

Second-largest. Wake Forest's biggest day ever is still 79–0 over William Jewell on September 21, 1940 — and even 79 would not have made the record book look up. To find the number that has stood for 110 years, you go back to a Saturday in Atlanta, a contract nobody could escape, and a coach carrying a grudge from baseball season.

On October 7, 1916, at Grant Field, Cumberland College of Lebanon, Tennessee, arrived to play Georgia Tech. Cumberland, a small Presbyterian school, had discontinued its football program — but the game was on the schedule, and the contract said Cumberland would pay $3,000, roughly $89,000 in today's money, if its team failed to show. Georgia Tech's coach was John Heisman, and Heisman was also Georgia Tech's baseball coach. Earlier that year, Cumberland's baseball team had beaten his baseball team 22–0, and Heisman believed Cumberland had stocked its lineup with professional ringers. He held Cumberland to the football game — then removed its last excuse by paying the school $500 and covering the trip to Atlanta.

Building a football team for a school that had abolished football fell to George E. Allen, Cumberland's baseball captain. Allen gathered about a dozen players — his fraternity brothers, students from the law school — and brought them to face one of the strongest teams in the South.

It was 63–0 after the first quarter and 126–0 at halftime. By the surviving play-by-play, Georgia Tech scored on every set of downs it played. Tech never attempted a forward pass. Cumberland never made a first down; its longest play of the afternoon gained 10 yards, and the standard accounts credit the Bulldogs with 15 turnovers. Sportswriter Grantland Rice's judgment has outlived everyone who was in the stadium: "Cumberland's greatest individual play of the game occurred when fullback Allen circled right end for a 6-yard loss." The Atlanta Journal wrote that the only thing necessary for a touchdown was to give a Tech back the ball and holler "Here he comes" and "There he goes."

At halftime, Heisman reportedly warned his players that you just can't tell what those Cumberland players have up their sleeves — and then agreed to the afternoon's only act of mercy: the third and fourth quarters were shortened from 15 minutes to 12. The final was 222–0. The game ball, with the score written on it, survived as a memento; in 2014 it sold at a charity auction for $40,388.

The record has now stood for 110 years, and the modern ceiling explains why it will keep standing. The highest major-college total since is Houston's 100–6 win over Tulsa in 1968 — nobody at the top level has reached 100 points since. The most lopsided championship game ever played, Georgia's 65–7 demolition of TCU for the national title in January 2023, stopped 12 points short of what Wake Forest did Saturday. Because the modern mismatch has a floor the 1916 game never had: Merrimack is a real FCS program, with scholarships and a coaching staff and a season of film, and Wake Forest's starters still spent the second half watching the backups score 28 more points. The 1916 number required an opponent that did not, in any working sense, have a football team at all — and a coach who had been waiting since the spring to settle a baseball score. That combination cannot be scheduled anymore.

So Saturday goes into Wake Forest's books exactly as big as it felt: a modern-era scoring record, a career half from a backup quarterback, a shutout 11 years in the making. And 145 points above it, right where it has sat since before the forward pass mattered, sits 222–0. Not close. It was never going to be close.