I've said numerous times that for me 2023 is about vibes and cultures rather than wins and losses. I will probably be about ready to grab pitchforks if Stanford wins zero, one, or two games and to organize a parade if Stanford wins six or more games, but 3-5 wins is where I see a very high likelihood of the 2023 season ending up and, absent additional qualitative and contextual information, I don't think three versus four versus five wins really means anything in evaluating the program's health. Those evaluations are going to have to be more qualitative and contextual. That being said, a discussion on another board got me to thinking about what I would like to see in 2023 to maintain optimism Taylor is turning this thing around. Aside from my real answer of vibes and culture, the best I can do is this:
The Sagarin ratings give us a fairly objective way at the end of seasons to numerically represent not just the quality of the team but also the quality of a given game. You can get an opponent- and location-adjusted grade, so to speak, for any given game by taking the margin of victory or loss minus Stanford's home field advantage or plus the opponent's home field advantage). For instance, the standout game of Shaw's last season was of course the win at Notre Dame, which was a two point win on the road (1.88 home field advantage in college football last season) against the #17 team in the country (83.77 rating), giving a "grade" by my lights of 87.65. That's a game befitting the #8 team in the nation. Clearly a triumph. The second best game of the season was actually the loss against Oregon State. That was a result befitting a top 20 team given how good the Beavers ended up being. Losing to Oregon State was a better sign of competitiveness than the ways we beat Colgate and Arizona State. In the end, we finished with two games in which we played commensurate to a top 25 team.
Given that relevance in college football is defined by the top 25, that strikes me as as good a gauge as any: how many games does your team play like one that is relevant nationally. For Shaw in 2022 it was two. Obviously that's really bad. For Harbaugh in 2007, it was four: Greatest Upset Ever, trouncing San Jose State post-bye in Harbaugh's second game/first win, beating a good Cal team, and winning on the road against a middling Arizona team. Those happen to also be the four wins, but sometimes a loss is more impressive than a win when you account for circumstance (as in the case of last year's Oregon State loss) and that wasn't the case that year. None of our losses were impressive (closest was TCU, in which we played like we were the equivalent of a top 70 team (essentially exactly what the computers ultimately judged us to be accounting for the four good wins. Having four games playing at a level worthy of college football relevance is not good - less than half the games - but it was a step forward for Stanford that year.
This strikes me as a fair and interesting way to measure progress next year. Taylor gets us two games in which we're looking like we belong among the relevant (top 25) teams nationally and he's at least treading water with our previous level in the face of a brutal roster attrition/rebuild/cultural transformation challenge, scrape out three and it's a very encouraging sign, get to four or more and Harbaugh comparisons become legitimate.
Any thoughts on this/other ways to evaluate the 2023 team?
P.S. My proposed metric here is one you can't reliably use until the season is over. But for what it's worth, my back of the envelope view on the first few games of the Taylor era is that we should be excited if we can beat Hawaii by 25 OR lose to USC by only two scores. I think it's greedy to expect both and it's probably more likely than not either happens. Just throwing it out there as the rough level of result I think would be exciting insofar as providing meaningful evidence of competitiveness.
