Was curious as to how our faculty salaries rank.

According to this we are 10th: https://www.collegeraptor.com/college-rankings/details/AverageFacultySalary/

I expected us to be higher.

I fully expect a thoroughly embarrassing Stanford attendance showing when Stanford and TCU square off tonight, that makes people across the country wonder why Stanford even bothers with football.

But there is one level of humiliation that can't be topped. It's one thing for Notre Dame and Oregon to outdraw Stanford at a home game, and do it by a 2-1 margin. It's probably another if TCU can draw more fans to Stanford than Stanford can. Please tell me if y'all think TCU could outdraw Stanford tonight.

I'm at this moment not expecting TCU to outdraw Stanford, but if I am wrong, I want to be set straight, so I can be prepared to witness it.

Here is the football recruiting notes thread for August. If you missed any of the action from July, click here.


Stanford opened up the month of August with a commitment from 2025 3-star linebacker Nusi Taumoepeau. The commitment thread is here.


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After landing Taumoepeau, Stanford's 2025 class has 19 commitments and is ranked 36th in the Rivals team recruiting rankings. Check out the full list of commitments here in case you need to refresh your memory.

As far as immediate things on the horizon, Stanford and Michigan are in a battle for 4-star offensive tackle Andrew Babalola. All my intel indicates it's essentially a two-horse race. It would be very surprising if he doesn't end up at one of those two schools. It's hard to say where he's leaning.

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4-star safety CJ Jimcoily is announcing next week on August 8th. LSU is the consensus front runner here with Stanford still being in play. If I had to guess, I would say he's probably LSU bound, but going off the comments that he has told me, I think there's a possibility he comes to Stanford. We'll just have to see. I'll of course let you guys know if I hear anything more on him.

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4-star offensive tackle Josh Petty appears to be Florida State bound. I have a FutureCast in for the Seminoles. NIL is a bigger factor for him plus his sister is going to to Florida State, so there's that pull as well. All the intel I've indicated makes it pretty clear he's not coming to Stanford and that Florida State is his likely landing spot.

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3-star wide receiver/athlete Christian Neptune is still waiting to announce. Not sure when he'll make his decision known, but I still like Stanford's chances of landing him. South Florida is the other front runner. I just have a hard time seeing him pass up on the chance to come to Stanford given his options, but maybe he'll opt to stay home.

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I think odds are low with 4-star linebacker Mantrez Walker, but they get him on an official visit in June. If there's one school to pull him away from Colorado, I think Stanford would be the school just because of the academic pull. But the longer he doesn't flip, the more likely I think he stays put. Still wanted to address him though in case anyone was wondering about him.

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One name to keep tabs on 4-star running back Tiqwai Hayes. My personal belief is he visited Stanford but wanted to keep it on the down low. He's currently committed to Penn State. I think there is a possibility he flips. But if he does, it will come as a "surprise." He's keeping things close to the vest from what I can gather.

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That's all I've got for the 2025 class. If you want to check out the offers for 2026, click here. Once guys start visiting this fall, that will give us a better sense of where things sit with the class. One name I would like to highlight in the 2026 class is 4-star wide receiver Trent Mosely. His older brother Emmett Mosley V is balling out for Stanford as a true freshman. Adam Gorney caught up with Trent recently. You can read all about that here. He said a big thing he's looking for his how Stanford uses and showcases his brother. So, if Mosely has a strong season, that's gonna up the chances of Stanford landing Trent.


If anyone has any questions/comments, fire away. I'll do my best to answer them. I'm sure @SamuelMcF will have his own insights as well.

Watching the Cal Poly vs University of San Diego game on ESPN+; it’s 10 -0 USD early in the 2nd quarter.

Maybe I’m a blind optimist, but watching the Torreros have their way against Cal Poly I do feel we have a good shot at a win next week

Stanford, which beat Milwaukee and Minnesota, beat highly ranked Wisconsin in four sets.

Terrific women’s volleyball. Ruben as always a star. iPar a standout.

Huh?

Miller Moss, Infinity; David Shaw, Zero

Read that here.

Maybe 12,000 in the stands. Maybe.

TCU's players were bigger, faster, and more athletic in general. It was noticeable. They bungled a bunch of plays making the game closer than it should have been, but I was pretty sure they were going to win after the first quarter.

Both coaching staffs made a bunch of bone headed decisions. No one had a monopoly on that.

That said, with all of the stupid things TCU did out there, trying to hand us the game, our offense was so putrid that we didn't take advantage of it. Sad to see. Pass after pass jump balls - thrown to the wrong spot. Few decisive throws and few decisive routes.

The carriage contract DTV has with Disney is up at midnight tonight. This means barring ESPN allowing its channels to be carried while negotiations continue, ABC and ESPN channels will be unavailable to DTV customers tomorrow.

This seems like a dangerous game for DTV. I'm pretty sure Disney would like nothing more than to see a massive drive of signups to Disney+ or whatever its streaming offerings are. Will any of you with DTV who still haven't gone exclusively to streaming services like YouTube, Fubo, etc. finally drop DTV if the Disney channels go off DTV for even a few days? Monday Night Football is probably the big hook ESPN is trying to use to drive its contract up, but if people drop DTV and go to pay ESPN directly, DTV may have to capitulate to ESPN, but it also may not be able to get customers it loses back.

If you were on the fence about buying the ESPN+ coverage to see more Stanford games (of whatever sports), could this dispute push you off DTV for good?

Anyone impacted by this and care to comment about their plans?

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....

I honestly can't believe the gap between the supposed best the ACC has in Clemson, and arguably the best the SEC offers in Georgia.

The gap between #1 and #14 is much greater than the gap between Stanford and TCU. Maybe Miami will make the ACC look good against Florida.

Since it appears that we don’t have a means of asking Taylor hard questions or getting real answers, wondering if, assuming you review the tape, could weigh in in the following:

1) how much of the horrific passing game is a result of bad scheme vs bad qb play? My eyes said that Daniels systematically avoids looking at the whole field or taking the short stuff in favor of low percentage long throws to covered guys.

2) how many of the negative plays were the result of bad/wrong reads or holding the ball too long?

3) on those rare occasions when RBs get the call, do we ever use any power/trap/misdirection? If not, why not? Seems like every run other than a qb scramble is an attempt at outside with reach blocks.

4) the q4 td drive was efficient and used a lot of short/medium passes. Was that a change in concept or better execution of the scheme?

5) what is preventing the WRs from getting better separation? I’m guessing too many go routes. At least with Elic and Tiger there is some athleticism.

Thank you.

Read that here.

Read that here.

Read and watch that here.

I head into the stadium right when the gates open. I like to see the players working out on the field before they get their pads on.
Bailey was completely engaged, going full speed through individual drills with the other edge guys. It was not uncommon to see Bailey skip this last year or dog it.
Bailey started at the field OLB position last night and you could tell from the first snap that he was motivated. He was pursuing. He was getting in on piles that he would not have last year. He chased down a receiver 40 yards down the field to prevent a TD at the time. HE WAS ON THE DAMN KO COVER TEAM.

So credit is due to the player and staff for fixing the disconnect that they had between each other last year. Tafiti ended up playing a bunch more snaps and of course you don’t like to see emotional 15 yard penalties but overall it looked liked a positive step.

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Anyone know why Miner isn’t playing and isn’t dressed? She is standing on sidelines seemingly ok. Taylor Yu is setting. All the announcers said was that Miner was scratched

FYI. Ipar Kurt and Jordyn Harvey are starting as the two pins (with Rubin) and playing 6 rotations. No DS playing except Pringle as the serving specialist. Julia Blyashov in a boot. Hope she’s ok for Sunday.

Stanford won the first set 25-20 ending the set with two straight aces by Harvey.

Read that here.

Read and watch that here.

SCHEDULE:
TCU__-__W
Cal Poly__-__W
@ Syracuse__-__L
@ Clemson__-__L
Virginia Tech__-__W
@ Notre Dame__-__L
SMU__-__L
Wake Forest__-__W
@ NC State__-__L
Louisville__-__W
@ Cal__-__W
@ San Jose State__-__W

RECORD:__7-5

BOWL:__Los Angeles Bowl vs. Colorado State

OFFENSIVE MVP:__WR Tiger Bachmeier__(1,000+ Yards)

DEFENSIVE MVP:__LB Gaethan Bernadel__(100+ Tackles)

BOLD PREDICTIONS:

* Stanford upsets *Top 10 Ranked* Virginia Tech (5-0) at home the week after Virginia Tech upsets Miami on the road, marking our biggest win of the season and first Top 10 win since upsetting #3 Oregon in 2021

* Stanford becomes Bowl Eligible for the first time in 6 years after opening and closing their season with game-winning FGs in the final minutes of regulation (Emmet Kenney emerges as our new Mr. Clutch)

* Stanford loses Elic Ayomanor to season-ending injury in October, prompting him to return for the 2025 season on a record-setting NIL deal (by Stanford's standards)

* Elijah Brown supplants Ashton Daniels as the starting QB halfway through the season

* Stanford once again fails to produce a 1,000+ YD RB for the 7th straight season

* David Bailey, Wilfredo Aybar, and Teva Tafiti combine for 18 sacks

* Stanford fields it's best defense since 2018

* Stanford rebounds with a 5-1 record at The Farm after going 0-7 at home in 2023

* Troy Taylor once again proves he's one of the best turnaround artists in the game and draws significant attention from programs across the country with head coaching vacancies
_

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Read and watch that here.