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NC State is only a 9.5 point favorite over Stanford.

Stanford is 2-5-1 ATS this season, meaning they in general underperform their expectations.

LAY the 9..5 and you can at least make money off Stanford losing. If Stanford beats the spread, you at least get some satisfaction that they were competitive against a team that beat Cal.

FWIW, Stanford was 5-7 ATS in 2023.

Quarterback day dreaming

Some names:

Gio Lopez (South Alabama): #25 in Total QBR as a redshirt freshman, reported a 3.4 high school GPA

Caden Veltkamp (Western Kentucky): #30 in Total QBR as a redshirt sophomore, reported a 3.7 high school GPA and 25 ACT

John Mateer (Washington State): #31 in Total QBR as a redshirt sophomore, Pac-12 Academic Honor Roll and College Sports Communicators Academic All-District

Darian Mensah (Tulane): #34 in Total QBR as a redshirt freshman, reported a 3.5 high school GPA, from California

Devon Dampier (New Mexico): #44 in Total QBR as a true sophomore, Mountain West All-Academic, majoring in electrical engineering, reported 3.8 high school GPA

Aidan Bouman (South Dakota): #2 PFF grade in FCS, has a sixth year of eligibility left next year, MVFC honor roll

Jaden Craig (Harvard): #5 PFF grade in FCS in his third year, goes to Harvard

Camden Coleman (Richmond): #9 PFF grade in FCS (albeit splitting time) as a true sophomore, Glenn Scholar Athlete Award for highest GPA, Rotary Club Award for Academic Excellence

Joe Pesansky (Holy Cross): #12 PFF grade in FCS as a fourth year player, still has a fifth year if he wants it, Patriot League Academic Honor Roll

Tommy Rittenhouse (Illinois State): #13 PFF grade in FCS as a fourth year player, still has a fifth year if he wants it, academic all state in high school

Malcolm Mays (Hampton): #14 PFF grade in FCS (albeit splitting time) as a fourth year player, still has a fifth year if he wants it, CAA Commissioner's Academic Honor Roll

Hayden Johnson (Lehigh): #16 PFF grade in FCS (albeit splitting time) as a true freshman, reported 3.98 high school GPA

Brady Meitz (Stetson): #20 PFF grade in FCS as a fourth year player, still has a fifth year if he wants it, PFL Academic Honor Roll, pre-med biology major who plans to go to medical school and become an orthopedic surgeon

Miller Moss (USC): #26 in Total, one year of eligibility left, just saying maybe there's a world Riley gets fired or decides he needs a sexier QB or Moss wants to get Stanford on his resume after all this time.....yeah, I said day dreaming

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Just some names I'd be intrigued by if neither Daniels nor Brown takes big strides the rest of the way. The first five guys (plus Moss of course) are good major college football quarterbacks right now. The FCS guys obviously play much worse competition and would be riskier (though one could also imagine some FCS guys transferring to Stanford to be backups). Among that group, Bouman, Pesansky, and Rittenhouse play legitimate competition by FCS standards and Bouman already leads a flat out better team than Stanford. The others are likely too big of a leap in competition to be worth considering unless it's consciously as a backup option if we experience QB attrition this offseason.

If I'm Troy Taylor, Mensah, Dampier, and Bouman get a loooooooong look. Now, my thinking on this is probably not novel and these guys may have much better options than Stanford, but you don't make shots you don't take. Again, absent a big month ahead it is possible that probabilistically nobody in our pipeline is likely to be a better option next year.

Elijah Brown likely still our QB of the future and it's far too early to write him off, just musing on what's out there.

How rare are two and done coaches?

Unfortunately our season has been so catastrophic that now multiple threads discuss the pros and cons of retaining Taylor. Needless to say that is not where any of us thought or hoped we would be heading into this season. It's hard to envision Stanford moving on from Taylor after just two seasons so it says a lot that people are even discussing this. We've heard a few references to how rare or unfair such a move would be.

I will note that this century there have only been ten coaches who have been in the 90-110 range both of their first two seasons, as Taylor appears destined to be: Ron Zook at Illinois, Bobby Johnson at Vanderbilt, Randy Edsall at Maryland, Geoff Collins at Georgia Tech, Gerry DiNardo at Indiana, Ted Roof at Duke, Charlie Weis at Kansas, Gene Chizik at Iowa State, Chad Morris at Arkansas, and Jon Embree at Colorado. Among that group, three (Chizik, Morris, and Embree) were let go after just two years, so clearly it's not that unusual - thirty percent of the time when somebody fails as much as Taylor has. Among the rest, DiNardo and Weis were let go after the third year and the other five muddled through for more years yet. There were not a lot of good years in all the years these teams spun their wheels with these coaches. Vanderbilt in 2008 - Johnson's only winning season - and Zook a couple of times (Year 3 and Year 6 squeaked into being top 40 teams). Across Zook, Johnson, Edsall, Collins, DiNardo, Roof, and Weis, their post-Year 2 wheel spinning amounted to 20 seasons with, again, only three good ones. They were zombie coaches being kept on in the vain hope it would work out. The truth is that being a Power Four coach without being able to crack the top 90 in either of your first two seasons is profoundly damning. If you can't even belong on the field two years in it's really unlikely you are ever going to make it work. Ron Zook is the ceiling, at least this century.

Personally, I think that should be enough for us to be leaning pretty strongly to wanting to move on from Taylor. There have been other assertions about how rare it is to move on from a coach after just two years and how unlikely that is to work that I suppose I may interrogate this further in the coming weeks should things not start to look substantially up. For now, though, I will just make the point that the above history strongly reinforces the points made by @Alwayswithaudacity here and @Card Tricks here.

Lance Anderson

Congratulations to Lance Anderson for his head coaching debut! He didn’t get the win but I’m sure he felt some feelings getting to be a head coach for the first time. And if I were an Utah Tech fan I would have considered it a moral victory to lose to national power Montana State by only 24. That’s slightly closer than Sagarin predicted and much closer than last year’s 43 point game. It would be neat if Anderson could have some success. Pulling for him.

Taking stock of ACC/Stanford opponents

It's still a few weeks to early to have a good picture of the college football season, but since we have a bye and very little to talk about here's a snapshot of where things stand:

AP Poll

8. Miami
17. Notre Dame
19. Louisville
21. Clemson
27. Syracuse
30. Boston College
35. Cal
39. North Carolina
43. Pitt

Sagarin

7. Notre Dame
10. Miami
20. Clemson
21. Louisville
27. Florida State
29. TCU
38. Virginia Tech
40. SMU
41. Cal
53. Georgia Tech
55. Boston College
57. North Carolina
59. Syracuse
62. Pitt
64. NC State
75. Duke
79. Virginia
83. Stanford
84. Wake Forest
97. San Jose State

Many of us have observed how weak the ACC is and how we've found the weakest power conference, but it really brings it home to see that the Sagarin central mean currently has the Pac-12 ahead of us. We are in a worse "conference" than Washington State and Oregon State! (Lots of season still left obviously, and this is also obviously an artifact of averages, but wow)

Reiterating the caveat that it is too early to much care what Sagarin thinks, the current win probabilities according to Sagarin:

TCU - 0 percent

Cal Poly - 100 percent

@ Syracuse - 23 percent

@ Clemson - 2 percent

Virginia Tech - 33 percent

@ Notre Dame - 0 percent

SMU - 34 percent

Wake Forest - 61 percent

@ NC State - 25 percent

Louisville - 18 percent

@ Cal - 17 percent

@ San Jose State - 50 percent

Total expected wins: 3.63

Bottom line is we are in the range people thought we would be and beating Syracuse would be one of those results that can change trajectories.

Basketball Okpara’s transfer from the Harvard perspective

This Harvard alumni magazine article gives its take on the current athletic jumble. Starts off with a discussion of Okpara’s transfer to Stanford

Football Recruiting 2025 football recruiting

Lots of posters hereabouts are doubtful about Taylor's recruiting. This is sheer emotionalism with little connection to reality.

We are currently rated #33. https://stanford.rivals.com/commitments/football/2025

That's better than UCLA, Arizona and Florida State. 2 behind Clemson.

Personally, if we can have the #33 team in the country 2 years from now, I'll be happy. Jim Harbaugh is not coming back and we can't expect to be a top 10 team. But if we can get to 33 in 2 years, we can be a top 20 team. Expecting better than #33 in the short term is unrealistic.
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