1. The most depressing part about yesterday's game was that blowing a big (by these two teams' standards) fourth quarter lead to lose a heart-breaker against our rival felt like dodging a bullet. Those who follow the program know that, for the complacent set, wins against Notre Dame and Cal would have ludicrously covered up a lot of sins. Now there's at least a chance that the accumulating embarrassments and futility might rattle those who matter. Please. This needs to stop. It's such an embarrassment to the university and disservice to the players, and there's no point to it. It isn't providing a good experience to student-athletes, building bonds of attachment for alumni to the university, making money, or advancing Stanford's reputation. It's a lose-lose-lose-lose proposition. This shouldn't be a hard call to move on and hopefully the mounting indignities make it happen. I know it's an uphill battle but we shouldn't lose sight of what a no brainer it is that Stanford needs to move on from Shaw, for everybody's benefit (even his, if he's unable to recognize that himself).
2. For somebody who grew up going to every Big Game and understands what a big event it can/should be for the Bay Area, yesterday was sad. The morning after Big Game, it is the fourth story on gostanford.com. I assure you we do not have more traffic or interest in cross country, volleyball, or water polo. We're rightfully humiliated by our football program and burying it. But Cal isn't much better. This was the first time since 2000 in which neither team had a chance of a bowl and the first time since 1998 both teams have losing records two years in a row. This was two of the worst Power Five teams in the country in a depressing pillow fight to see which team was more incompetent. Turned out it was us, but man Cal is bad. The game wasn't even televised on a real network. It was surreal this morning to check out the box score and see that even after the news of the last two weeks this game took place on "FTX Field." But maybe that's an appropriate symbol of the emptiness and fraudulence of these football programs. There was one and only one thing about this game that cut against the overwhelming irrelevance of it all: a good crowd. Good for those who went to the game and made noise, and I'm happy for the loyal Bear backers that their loyalty was rewarded with something to celebrate. Even then, the attendance serves as another stark reminder of just how bad Stanford is: this was the biggest crowd at Memorial Stadium in over nine years, since Ohio State came to town. Cal has had better teams in the last nine years. Why did the fans come out yesterday? It's obvious: they knew how bad Stanford is and smelled blood in the water. It says so much about Stanford's program that we can't bribe our fans to go to our home games and our opponents have to turn their fans away because we're the surest win around.
3. It drives home how bad we are that we lost by a touchdown to a 3-7 team even though we made a 61 yard field and the opponent did everything they could to hand the game to us. Much was made about Cal's turmoil on offense with the offensive coordinator and offensive line coach being fired and, sure enough, they were a hot mess on that side of the ball. Despite playing a Stanford team that is ok at defending the pass and atrocious at defending the run, Cal barely ran, giving Stanford an enormous gift. When they did pass, the individual players were what the French call les incompetents. The receivers dropped five passes. Most damaging, the quarterback threw not one but two interceptions in the end zone. Throwing balls up for grabs in the end zone is bad enough, but to do it on first down both times is unforgiveable. Cal deserved to lose purely because Plummer is such a moron, but fortunate for them they played a team that deserved to lose even more.
4. Man did we deserve to lose. The pivotal play of the game, of course, was Daniels' fumble leading to the scoop and score. For a team 130th (second to last, last in Power Five) in fumbles, we are well past the point of fluke on the horrid ball security. And for anybody who wants to pin the blame on Daniels particularly, yes, he's had extreme problems holding on to the ball, but who hasn't had appalling ball security? Filkins and Smith were both leading running backs nationally in fumbles when they went down. Worst of all is our new return specialist Thompson, who if my calculations are right muffs the ball about once every six times he touches it. This is so obviously pandemic across the team that I have no patience for anybody who wants to pin this on the true freshman QB3 who has been one of the best parts of our run game this sad season. Stanford can't hold on to the ball, period. There may be anti-Gould explanations for this (and lord knows I think his resume at Stanford is awful and he has no claim to deserving to keep his job) but even more than that I think it's a psychologically battered, un-confident, un-focused, joyless team. It's really just a symptom of the system-wise catastrophic failure of the whole operation.
5. The real point vis-a-vis Big Game, though, is that you don't lose because of one play. As McKee said in his interview this week, the takeaway for the team on the 40th anniversary of The Play is "don't put the game in other people's hands." A game against a bad opponent shouldn't come down to an error by a third string freshman. The reality is these kinds of errors kill us because we're comprehensively terrible and thus always in a position where mistakes mortally wound us. As we all know, top of the list is the hopeless Shawfense. The latest tragicomic observation: this was actually Stanford's second best offensive performance of the last eight games and, adjusted for quality of opponent defense, arguably our second best offensive game of the season, behind only the Oregon State game. That's another poignant reminder that even our ceiling under Shawfense is bad. Good for us still equaled the worst non-Colorado performance against Cal in their last eight games. We had our most points in six games and it was still a touchdown worse than Cal's average on the season. Our 1.33 points per drive made the #97 defensive points per drive defense look like the #7 points per drive defense. Every game is just a continuing avalanche of evidence we have one of the worst offenses in the country.
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