It’s always tough to play football when you’re the smart-kid school of the conference and, like Stanford and Vanderbilt, Wake Forest is acutely aware of the limitations that brings, especially in a conference that tends to feature teams that aren’t as vigilant about that sort of thing.
However, unlike Stanford and Vanderbilt, Wake Forest gets the added benefit of being one of the smallest student bodies in the country. Whearas Stanford boasts an enrollment of 16,937 students (7,645 of them undergrad) and Vanderbilt sits at a total enrollment of 12,309 students (7,057 undergrad), Wake Forest has a total enrollment of 8,950, or just barely above the undergraduate counts of their fellow private smart-kid schools.