Read that here.

Who ya got and why, between Michigan and Washington?

I don't think Washington is ready for Michigan's defense and physicality. I don't think Michigan is ready for Washington's passing game.

Washington has the edge passing, Michigan running, and Michigan is better on Defense. But Penix is a far superior QB to McCarthy.

I'm going with Michigan. I think they will run the ball more than Texas did and their better Defense will do enough to slow Washington.

Read that here.

“Stanford has tried many times to get approval to develop their lands without any luck. Just go back and review the meetings with Santa Clara county and the demands that both the county and Palo Alto have made. Do you think that they preferred to go to Belmont or buy an apartment complex when they've had over a century of erecting buildings on their property? It's political Kabuki by the governmental agencies.
I think they were wise in finding alternate strategies, especially the Oak Creek acquisition.”
—
I don’t know the entire history of negotiations with the county and city. I don’t know what sort of demands and/or concessions were made. My understanding is the city (and county?) are pushing Stanford to use Stanford land for 70% of their new housing needs and the other 30% would be from land Stanford acquired/acquires in surrounding cities. (It might’ve been 25% in the past but I think it changed to 30% last year.) Does my understanding sound correct? Is that the hang-up? If so, Stanford’s only committing 70% of Stanford proper for its housing needs and 30% would be shifted to surrounding communities, no?

Those surrounding communities are already afflicted with tremendous NIMBY-ism. The surrounding communities are already suffering from outrageous unaffordability. You got folks working here to service local labor demands, including at the university, while commuting from the likes of Sacramento and Merced counties, all because of insatiable greed.

So, now more Stanford folks will be moving into Oak Creek Apartments and less folks in the community will be able to afford to live where they work, more folks moving out to Sacramento and Merced, more folks commuting terrible distances, more environmental costs, less development of land to increase density for what’s truly needed as labor demands continue to increase along with the growing housing shortage.

Everyone wants to complain about the Rule of Mammon for trivialities like sports when the real issues affecting exponentially more lives are given a blind eye.

Nope, I’m not persuaded. Oak Creeks shouldn’t be reserved for Stanford so that Stanford proper can be an oasis of undeveloped land while shifting labor and housing burdens onto others in another form of NIMBY-ism.

As far as their property is concerned, if you want to add another room to your house, or construct an addition or whatever, you’re gonna have to go to the city for the necessary permits. You can risk building without permits but that’s unwise. In short, there are all sorts of constraints on real property — even if it’s yours. In other words, I‘m unpersuaded.

And full disclosure — I‘m not an alum, I’m just a local, a former university employee. I understand I‘m not preaching to the choir.

Rant over.

Last edited: 2 minutes ago

Stanford release is here. I'll add my own write up in here once I get that up.

I discovered an 8th grader (class of 2028) that is 6 foot 6 and shoots 3s well, dribbles really well/can create own shot, and moves really well. Dad played o-line at USC and Mom played basketball at UCLA. Can someone notify Tara?

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Things are changing faster than I can keep up with.

By my count there will be 18 teams in the ACC next year (ugh). For football TV there will be 17 because ND doesn't count.

I get the ACC channel for free. But how is that going to work? Early in the season you could have 17 different games on a given Saturday. Move one to Thursday night and one to Friday night but then what?

What do those geniuses running the ACC know that I don't?

Interesting article in The Athletic by Max Olson "Michigan missing pieces: 5 Newcomers who helped lift Michigan to to the CFP title game". Of course, Drake Nugent is one of the 5 newcomers written about. The quote of Nugent in the article is telling "Nugent started all 14 games at center, earned the respect of league coaches as a first-team All-Big Ten selection and is a Rimington Award finalist. He jokes that it was fairly surreal to experience and enjoy a Rose Bowl victory given where he’d been, enduring Stanford losses “in front of 15,000 fans.” What did it take to prove he belonged? “All you’ve gotta do is just go in and work your balls off,” he said."

Flipped from Boston College.

Read that here.

Read that here.

Decision day was one of the happiest and most proud moments I can remember. Over Christmas break, I was able to put together this video montage for one of the newest future Cardinal students. We always bemoan how few Stanford athletic fans there are, but these video highlights from Stanford football (3 Rose Bowls, Alamo, Holiday, Sun, Orange, Foster Farms), basketball, volleyball, baseball, and tennis (and featuring cameos by Condi Rice, CMac, and Michelle Wie) show there is clear value!

Our daughter grew up thinking of Stanford only as a sports school (LOL) but now has become her dream come true for the next 4 years.

Wanted to share this so some of you could share in our joy, and also to ask if anyone on this board knew or had connections to any sports people at Stanford or in the Bay Area. Our daughter played varsity volleyball for 3 years and varsity tennis for 4 years at a 3200 student public HS in Houston and has been a huge sports fan her whole life. This past summer she actually did an independent research project on Asian MLB players and got her project accepted at SabreSeminar, the largest sports baseball analytics conference in the country. She was the only high school student that presented, giving a 10 minute talk in front of 300 MLB execs and analysts. She connected with a ton of people afterwards, with one of the Milwaukee Brewers VP telling her she was "one of the highlights of the whole weekend." A professor at Rice who was in attendance (and was assistant GM of Dodgers and Astros, both in years they won the World Series) connected with her afterwards, inviting her to campus to meet individually with 4 members of their #1 ranked undergrad sports management/analytics department. They tried really hard to recruit her to Rice, but Stanford has always been her dream (I wonder why LOL).

She has a strong communication background (placed 3rd in the nation in congressional debate and 1st in Texas in feature story writing), but her hope is to work in sports after pursuing policy/economics as an undergrad and then possible law or grad school. Her dream job would be to be a MLB GM, and she's already thinking of connections she can make in college.

So if anyone has any leads with Stanford sports or with any other professional Bay Area teams, please let us know! And if anyone is in this profession/industry, she'd love to make more connections. Thanks and Go Stanford!

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Read that here.

My write up on that is here. I'm designating this "Kinda OT" because Stanford isn't mentioned in the article, but I still felt some of you might be curious to see who did well this cycle in the portal. Cal actually made my list of teams having done well. They added some nice pieces. So that's a bit relevant since they are the school joining Stanford in the ACC next year from the Pac-12.

In the "Athletic," some interesting (and depressing) articles on football recruiting.

Top players reporting signing NIL agreements for 300-400K a year. Some getting paid to go on unofficial visits.

After an article about Michigan winning over Alabama with a lot lower ranked recruits, from the comment section:

Thomas O.
· 19h 29m ago
@Jeff S.
You mean other teams in college football have "cheated"? Good heavens! From all of the articles and posting haters you would think Michigan was the only team ever to violate NCAA rules. ( BTW, only Stanford of all Power 5 schools has not been issued a major NCAA infraction in their history).

December is upon us! Time for the December football recruiting notes thread. If you missed anything from November, that thread is here.

Three other threads that have been useful as we enter December: The Offseason Attrition thread, the Seniors declaring to return thread, and the Transfer targets thread.

This past weekend, Stanford had four official visitors. From my intel, all of them are guys who are they are trying to flip. One of which has been successfully flipped in 2024 3-star LB Bo Tate. Stanford obviously looking to flip more guys and given what I'v been able to gather plus certain tweets the team has put out, sounds like Tate isn't the only one. Which is exciting.

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Touching quickly on the transfer portal, Stanford has been evaluating their roster holistically after the season and made it clear to guys where they stand in terms of what their plans are for them going into next season. That has helped guys make informed decisions about whether to stay or transfer. I do think Troy Taylor wants to get as much new blood in the program as possible and while all areas of the team need an upgrade, I've heard offensive line is a real area of focus right now. Hopefully Levi Rogers comes back, but don't be surprised if he tests the waters of the portal to see what's out there. I'm sure that's something he's evaluating right now.

Aside from Spencer Jorgensen, everyone can in theory come back though we've already seen some guys hit the portal (check the attrition thread for a full count of that). I think a lot of guys will be given a "thank you for your service" type of treatment, but a few guys like Rogers and Ben Yurosek would be welcomed back if they wanted to return. Same with Josh Karty, who I assume will enter the NFL draft.

Tobin Phillips and Tristan Sinclair have both affirmed that they'll be back. So that's a couple of key guys from the defense who are going to be back.

Signing Day is December 20th. For a full list of who is expected to sign, click here. That's a link to the current list of 2024 commits. I'll cover Signing Day the same way I have in the past. I'll just turn this into the Signing Day Hub and then once Signing Day is over, I'll switch it back to the recruiting notes thread. I believe that's how I did it last year. The staff is excited about the group they have coming in and are hoping to secure a couple more commitments before they hit signing day. I guess since they had four guys on official visits, that would be four guys in total they are hoping to flip. Assuming those four are all 2024 guys, which I believe they are. Stanford currently has 25 commits an a class ranked 26th in the Rivals 2024 team rankings. That's a solid group even with some of the guys who have left.

At this point in time, the focus is all on getting that class signed, meeting with all the commits, and letting them know they are valued and that they are excited to be adding them to the program. Even though the team only won three games this past season, I can tell you the program is very excited about the future. Lots of positive energy. A very different vibe from the end of the Shaw era, which ended with a rather dismal game against BYU. Just like no energy after that one. Except the news that Shaw was stepping down. That was the highlight of the night.

If anyone has any questions or anything else they want me to address, just comment below. I'm keeping this post to the 2024 guys, but if anyone wants me to answer any 2025 questions, fire away. I will say that things do appear to be trending in a really nice direction with 4-star quarterback Bear Bachmeier and then 4-star cornerback Chuck McDonald III, who I recently interviewed appeared to have a good experience at Big Game as well. That class has a lot of potential. If you need a refresher on who the current commits are in that class, just click here.

Read that here.

despite sets 2 and 3 tighter, always a fight just to get even, mostly playing from behind and never able to get up more than 1 or 2, while Florida able to get off multiple runs. In truth this match not even close. Never a sense of Stanford in control. No Way Stanford deserved that #2 ranking.
I know, Baird still out, nonetheless a poor showing. No sense of urgency/concentration.
Maybe that Euro trip gave false confidence?

And yet another year of too many service errors costing us dearly.

On paper this is the most beatable UCLA team in the last few years. They have had attrition of their core dudes and are left with a young team who is still finding themselves.
Bona is pretty insane player. But their games are pretty low scoring, in part because of Cronin gritty defense (though foul prone) and in part because they are not good at shooting the 3, with a lot of 2nd chance stuff on the O boards. Still, UCLA's a well-coached team who always gets better as the year progresses so should still be a tough game for our guys.

Weird anomaly -- a road game at Pauley with this particular UCLA team is a Quad 3 game as UCLA's NET is even worse than Stanford's. It's been many years since that has been the case.

This is a class action lawsuit challenging the 85 scholarship limit. I have to wonder if some of the latest Stanford transfers would be sticking at Stanford if there was not an 85 scholarship limit. It does seem Stanford football players in particular would be in the sweet spot of the target class of this lawsuit.

An argument for unlimited scholarships makes a degree of sense. It's the only way the "water" of the player market can truly find its level. I mean let's say Michigan wants to offer 100 scholarships. Given only about 50 players will see much action, would they even be able to get 100 if they wanted them? Would be fascinating to see how the market would shake out without any limits.

How would no scholarship limits impact Stanford?

In a crazy coincidence, I was working with the firm bringing this lawsuit on a medical malpractice claim last year.

Read that here.

No shock here. Pac-12 release is below. I’ll add my write up in here once I get it done.

Alrighty, I figured this was worth its own thread. Got it confirmed.

The following guys are early enrolling for Winter 2024 quarter:

Elijah Brown, Sam Mattingly, Emmett Mosley, Benedict Umeh, Dylan Stephenson, & Cam Richardson.

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Read that here.

Bittersweet. Wonder if any TV contracts talk could had been better had a team in the Pac-12 won in the past few years.

Now i'm left wondering who to root for. Feel like we compete more against Michigan for players, so probably go with Washington and old Pac-12 pride.