1. We made it through the season. Opinions will differ on whether it was an encouraging first step in a challenging rebuild or a wasted season but fundamentally I don't think the two perspectives are all that different, merely a function of whether one looks at glasses half full or half empty. The new staff inherited one of the worst rosters in Stanford history and faced one of the toughest schedules in Stanford history while taking on the challenges that come with resurrecting a moribund football culture. It was almost certainly going to be a season that looked something like this. Optimists will cling to the signs of fight and pessimists will lament how far we are from being competitive. Because it's a new dawn after half a decade of irrelevance and almost no fun the preponderance of fans will be inclined toward patience and optimism. But both views have merit and I think the bottom line is the season did not matter very much for Stanford's future and it is still far too early to tell whether Taylor will work out.
2. In the end we got a season with as many wins as we could have expected, a sense that we have stanched the bleeding but the patient remains in precarious overall health, salutary signs of fight on both sides of the ball in the face of overwhelming odds, and a team that basically was what it was from the beginning of the season to the end. On this last point, people will want to say the team improved as the year went on but those who say that will be kidding themselves. We ended the season with three straight games not looking like a Power Five team and arguably not even looking like an FBS team. Our median performances this year (Oregon and Big Game) were right on the fringe of FBS level. Our best performances were spread out across the first half (Arizona and Colorado) and second half (Washington and Washington State) of the season. The truth is that we are who we thought we were and we were generally the same quality of team all year, one woefully outmatched against really good teams and typically capable of gamely scrapping against the mediocre ones. The virtue of the season was in instilling habits of resilience and fight, not actually improving. That will have to come with a turning over of this deeply limited roster. The real season now begins as Taylor and his staff buckle down on the roster construction, culture building, and strength and conditioning that actually matters for our future.
3. If you listen to Taylor and Ayomanor post-game that mindset shift to the off-season has already happened (though Taylor did emphasize grace notes about gratitude for how the players committed and battled this year), but since I am a completionist I will nonetheless analyze one more game from the honestly pretty irrelevant 2023 season. This Notre Dame game was a fairly typical game for us.
It was the fourth most we were gouged by an offense and Notre Dame is the fourth most dynamic offense we faced. Only Tennessee State and Central Michigan gave up more yards per play to Notre Dame, though we were pretty much exactly where Pitt was. We just could not match up this year against really good offenses. [With the benefit of hindsight, the Washington game looks like an outlier that says more about Washington (overrated, difficulty of running the gauntlet, Penix being banged up at the time, etc.) than us. The one thing that briefly kept it interesting were all the first half turnovers, which I view both as one of those signs of fight I mentioned but also a lucky spate that felt even in real time like something that would revert to the mean and an out of control blowout. This was a total mismatch. At the same time, as has been the case many times this season, we fought enough that it's possible to find silver linings. Believe it or not, on offense our yards per play was significantly above Notre Dame's average allowed. We had the fifth best yards per play on the season and Ohio State is the only team all year that did considerably better (we did far better on a yards per play basis than USC and Clemson did and we scored the third most points anybody has, with only Louisville and Clemson having more). Along with UCLA this was one of the two elite defenses we played this year. While we couldn't hang with either UCLA or Notre Dame, it's somewhat interesting that our offense did better against both than their norm. In Taylor's first year we were much better equipped to battle with great defenses than we were to battle with great offenses. I think that speaks to Taylor being much more established as a coach than April. Going into the off-season I have a sense that if Taylor can get the horses he can get us back to competitive offense whereas defense remains a complete question mark.
4. The thing we had been hoping all year to really solidify on defense in terms of our team identity was a Wisconsin-style run defense. We had encouraging signs on this at numerous points in the second half of the season but it's a rough way to end the season to go out on the run defense's worst note bar none. This was the most anybody has victimized us on the ground by over a hundred yards and over a yard per carry. It was the worst run defense performance in 20 games, which is saying a lot considering we are comparing to Lance Anderson's defense. Estime is arguably the best running back in the nation (Mel Kiper Jr. thinks so) and it was a mismatch in the trenches, so we shouldn't be too shocked, but you have to be unspeakably bad to give up that kind of yardage. It's the best Notre Dame has done on the ground in over three years. Really bad taste for April's first year to go out like this. In evaluating the pass defense yesterday, Notre Dame did not need to pass against us so they only threw 46 percent as many passes as their norm. They just didn't have to do much other than Estime down our throats. For what it's worth, though, against what little passing attack we did have to defend we did solidly, and very good by our standards, holding a top 20 passing game to right around their season average. This was a triumph for our pass defense but it's cold comfort because it came in the context of not being able to stop the opponent much at all (only one punt). I think the jury is out on whether we are on the right track defensively. Honestly there was less to like about this season on defense than I thought there would be heading into the year and we have to hope that April takes big steps going from his first season to his second.
5. On offense, statistically it was an awful passing performance (second worst yards per attempt and third worst passer rating of our season), but it looks better grading on a curve. Even before playing us Notre Dame ranked with Ohio State as the best pass defense in America. Doing anything against them is very difficult. Our passing game performance was bad but really could have been worse. We did similarly in the pass game to how Duke, Clemson, and Wake Forest did. On the ground, it was a fitting way for the weirdest run game season ever to end. Yesterday was our best run game performance against a Power Five team this season aside from the USC game, and USC is one of the worst run defenses and Notre Dame a good one, so this strikes me as pretty clearly the high point of our run game this year. Did we have a run game high point by finally letting RBs tote the rock? Nah.....TWO carries by running backs. Like we have all year, our success on the ground was from QBs. Such a bizarre season in terms of offensive playcalling. One of the biggest points of intrigue for next season will be if year-to-year improvement by the offensive line and a new cast of characters at RB lets us operate as a normal offense. I don't think it can be emphasized enough that we did not see a Troy Taylor offense this year. If one wants to call that a wasted season, fine, but I think it's ascribing importance that isn't/shouldn't have been there to have expected Stanford to have a normal year this year after all that was lost to transfers and NFL departures on offense. Let's see what next season brings.
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