1. Not much has changed. We never win at home. Nobody goes to our games. We are decidedly worse than competent but not great teams. The coaches have instilled enough grit and resilience in the team to battle but not enough quality to finish. All that being said, the real upshot of yesterday is that it reinforces exactly where most people think Stanford's program is right now. There were signs of very incremental progress compared to last year. I view this game as an authentic representation of Taylor's theory of the case for improving the program: slow, plodding, unglamorous progress. The problem I am having is I feel like questions are mounting regarding whether that will be enough to dig out of our hole and regarding what kind of ceiling this staff can have. Yesterday felt pretty discouraging, more than a seven point loss to a solid program should feel.
2. Folks know I can't resist my mathematical/mechanical gauges of where we are, though I understand that so early in the season preseason models should be taken with a salt shaker. The late field goal barely beat the spread and, depending on whether one uses SP+ or Sagarin, the performance was befitting something like the #68 or #78 team in the nation. Last year's team would have been expected to lose to this TCU team by 12-15 points. Moreover, given Dykes' national title runner-up pedigree and fairly successful resume, there is at least as good a chance that the current expectation of TCU as a top 40 team underrates them as there is that they're overrated. The other hand weighs heavier for me though, which is that this does not feel like progress compared to even last year's opener at Hawaii and this game felt like the competitiveness of the score overstated our competitiveness with TCU. If we've made progress from last year it seems more subtle than transformational.
3. The score overstated our competitiveness because we were super lucky. It started with the chaotic and hilariously fortunate first drive and then continued with TCU indiscipline bailing us out at numerous junctures, including the fourth quarter drive extending unsportsmanlike conduct penalty. Indeed, TCU gave up 100 penalty yards, the first time they've done that since 2021, and we were one of the least penalized teams to play so far this season (maybe that's an area of progress compared to last year). We created our own luck to a degree by winning the turnover battle (props to Bailey and Green, who both had quite bad games otherwise, for the kinds of punches that can change a game) but it's also the case that there is luck involved in whether fumbles become fumbles lost/recovered and in this game TCU had three fumbles and lost two while we had one fumble and did not lose it, a quite fortuitous bouncing of the balls for us. One of TCU's fumbles was at the goal line and deprived them of the opportunity for back-to-back possessions before and after the half to turn the momentum of the game. TCU also missed a fourth quarter field goal attempt from within 40 yards. We can hope that this was a sign of things to come in terms of being more disciplined than opponents, forcing turnovers, and having a special team edge over opponents but I also think it was just plain lucky to a large degree.
4. Yesterday was not an arrow up for Taylor's prospects to succeed as Stanford's coach. The offensive design/playcalling/effectiveness did not seem to match either his reputation or all that we return. His general preseason vibe seems potentially overly optimistic and at risk of being out of touch with where we are as a program. And the buck needs to stop with him for our continued inability to finish. Watching the post-game press conference with Taylor, Bernadel, and Daniels, I had the thought that there's a fine line between patient, process-oriented incrementalism and becoming inured to mediocrity. I still think our team's morale and attitude is better than it was the last several years under Shaw but I am starting to see risks in Taylor and Daniels' comments that their faith in the process may lead them to accept things that shouldn't be accepted. Taylor's culpability for failing to finish also stems from things he did in-game that did not improve our chances of winning. We can debate the shocking levels of aggressiveness on fourth down but I don't think there's much debate the fourth quarter choices did not do us any favors. For what it's worth, my view of the fourth down decisions is that the first quarter one in our own territory was a gutsy and effective nod to analytics (which Taylor claimed was behind the aggressiveness in general, basically disavowed responsibility by saying we just go by analytics), the third quarter one at the TCU 40 was a smart analytical decision even though it didn't pan out, the fourth and 5 from our own 35 early in the fourth quarter felt desperate and out of sync with the game's flow but maybe analytics say go for that, and 4th and 16 from your own 19 with more than two minutes remaining in a three point game in which your defense has been your relative strength is on the shortest lists of worst coaching decisions I can recall seeing at Stanford.
5. There was a bright spot in this game, which is that we showed enough on defense to hope that April and the defense are getting better, though we still need to see a lot more. It wasn't great by any stretch - my calculation of 2.83 points allowed per non-garbage drive is pretty ugly - but we did ok on defense. We gave up 6.01 yards per play, the sixth best we've done under April and the seventh best of TCU's last 13 opponents. That's respectable, reinforced by an adjustment for quality of opponent. If SP+ is right, this Dykes offense is the sixth or seventh best April has gone up against and will be the fourth or so best we face this year. The run defense was encouraging, one of the four best run defense games under this staff and one of the four worst TCU run performances in that span. Impressively, aside from playing the Philadelphia Eagles defense in the national championship game in 2022, last night was TCU's lowest yards per carry in a game since 2021 and the lowest an unranked team has held them to since 2018. I'm not ready to say our run defense has turned the corner as they had some nice moments last year too, but it's a start. The pass defense was totally middle of the road by how we've done under this staff and slightly worse than the defensive norm against Josh Hoover last year. I would have taken that going into the game. Hoover's stat line was eye-catching, but he's a good QB with a good primary weapon. This year is not like last year when we faced a murderer's row of QBs; I would actually guess Hoover is one of the toughest tests our pass defense will face. They did well enough to give us a chance. Alas....
