First Walter Camp player of the week on the Farm since Bryce Love: https://waltercamp.org/stanford-wr-...ented-by-the-heights-group-at-morgan-stanley/

1. How fun was that? We needed something to give players confidence that their hard work will pay off, fans legitimate reason to think we are on the right track beyond just blind faith, and the wider football world a reminder that we are capable of relevance. Last night gave us that in spades, a deeply fun and cathartic reward for players, coaches, and fans. I was grinning ear to ear deep into the night and early in the morning and I'm sure you all were to. I can only imagine what it felt like for the players, though the scenes of post-game euphoria gave a brief glimpse. In the big picture, I think comparisons to the Greatest Upset Ever are overwrought as this wasn't remotely as surprising, exciting, or indicative of ability to compete against top teams. I go back and forth on whether we should call it the Greatest Comeback Ever as it certainly was for us but isn't top ten in FBS history, whereas the Greatest Upset Ever was in a class of its own in term of upsets. And we haven't seen anything from this team to have much confidence we're capable of being good (in contrast, by this point in 2007 we had two performances befitting a top 25 team and were on the verge of a third in the seventh game). But equally big picture is thinking about how after a disappointing nearly first half of the season we went into a bye and came out of it with clearly the best performance of this new era. Undeniable progress. So far we've had games, in chronological order, befitting the #74, #196, #160, #67, #161, and #38 teams in the country. I'm very happy we came out of the bye with our best performance, that two of the last three games have been competitive Power Five level performances (and three of the last four competitive on the scoreboard), and especially that last night was so dang fun for everybody.

2. Sometimes you can say a great win was truly a full team effort. This is not one of those games, except in one important sense: all three phases showed resilience. Aside from that, offense, defense, and special teams all had significant struggles exemplifying a bad team. We won this game first and foremost because of one of the most epic individual performances in our history, Epic Elic if you will, and secondarily because Colorado shot itself in the foot repeatedly in key moments with personal fouls, substitution infractions, and unnecessarily dangerous throws. None of that is to diminish the second biggest takeaway from the game after Epic Elic, which was the awesome resilience. At multiple points Colorado continued to make things stressful for us (for instance pinning us so deep to start drives, not giving up big cushions in the two minute drill at the end of regulation, scoring the overtime touchdown, etc.) and we responded across the roster. I'm bursting with pride. It is also worth emphasizing that when opposing players and coaches lose composure like Colorado did (17 penalties for 127 yards!) with Travis Hunter's penalties and the 12 men on the field gifts to us we should get a lot of credit for inciting that. We dragged them into deep water and did a better job swimming than they did. Nonetheless, the story of this one was Ayomanor.

3. Truly one of the greatest individual games we've ever seen. When Troy Walters exploded for the previous record almost a quarter century ago, at least he had a QB, OL, and dynamic offense. This was one player taking the team on his back, all in the second half and all after a big missed opportunity he could have sulked about, unlike much I can ever remember. This was the most receiving yards in a game in Stanford history, fifth most catches in a game, and third most touchdown catches, all in the context of an extremely poor offense. And by the eye test, a gargantuan amount was yards after the catch and overcoming his QB's mediocrity. [This week's moving the chains (first down) leader board: Ayomanor (9), Lamson (5), Farrell (4), Bachmeier (3, plus drew a pass interference), Daniels (3), Reuben, Yurosek, Filkins, Roush] We knew from Ayomanor's mutant size/speed combo and buzzy recruitment (Notre Dame flirting with him despite having one of the best WR classes in the nation) that he had potential, but it's another to see a game like this. It's thrilling to think that all he needed was to shed the knee brace and develop some confidence. But don't call it a breakout. Ayomanor has been showing signs all year. He's been arguably our best player this season (PFF says so and he's now the only player on our roster who has a 70+ grade in three games this year). By the way, Ayomanor is a great example of why I am always so upset with the way Stanford reports eligibility for our players. Anywhere else in America, Ayomanor would be referred to as what he is - a redshirt freshman. I don't know if Stanford calling him a "sophomore who retains the ability to redshirt" will have impact on whether Ayomanor gets consideration for major honors or gets talked up as much in national circles, but it might. I will continue to talk about him as a freshman. And in that context, at the moment Ayomanor is having the most dominant freshman receiving season in the two plus decades I've tracked yards as a share of passing offense, with Ayomanor's 36 percent of our passing offense crushing Richard Sherman and Mark Bradford's 29 percent. There is no doubt that Ayomanor is the player of our season to this point.

4. I can't be as effusive about the rest of the team's performance. On defense, only TCU has given up more yards per play to Colorado, which despite the hype (deserved, by the way, because the improvement over last season is stunning) is still a sub-par team. On offense, we were a bit below average compared to what offenses typically do against Colorado. It was the highest yards per play we've had yet under the new staff, which is nice to see, but we got a 294 yard receiving half from a receiver and still didn't break six yards a play against one of the teams we're competing with for worst defense in Power Five football. This Stanford offense is horrible. For some context, halfway through the season without a single 6+ yard per play game compares unfavorably to Shaw teams always having at least three such performances. We have a really long way to go and I hope the remainder of the season we can build on this performance.

Elic Ayomanor is the Pac-12 Offensive Player of the Week, and Joshua Karty is the Pac-12 Special Teams Player of the Week.

Never a doubt.

(And Taylor was characteristically subdued after leading the greatest comeback in school history.)

Maybe this will be Taylor's equivalent of Harbaugh upsetting USC...in a relative sense.

Read that here.

Read that here. Courtesy of Clint Cosgrove.

While Colorado is no 2007 USC, this was huge for those of us that were hanging on with blind faith. https://www.mercurynews.com/2023/10...orado-echoes-a-breakthrough-win-16-years-ago/

A look at the elite LBs:

Anyone else watching him dominate? We used to have playmakers

Read that here.

Only 1 FBS QB has been sacked 4+ times in 5 straight games, tying the longest ugly streak in 20 years. Who is it?

It has to be Shedeur Sanders (we got him 4 times and had him dead to rights a few more), right?

NOPE! USC only sacked him 3 times. Drumroll please...

Jalen Milroe, Alabama​

Their LT and C are both A W F U L. True frosh mega-stud #1 OT recruit in the country Kadyn Proctor has allowed 18 pressures and 7 sacks by himself. Arkansas kicked his ass on Sat.

Get old in the trenches, people.

Read and watch that here.

1. Another game showing this very well may be the worst team in Stanford history. The silver lining is that there was enough fight in the first half to give Taylor something he can internally spin as a sign of progress. He can say that compared to the other top ten contender we faced this game at least saw us battle for a handful of drives. He can say that we played Oregon tougher than Portland State, Hawaii, and Colorado and had the exact same final score as Colorado. For a team and fan base that will be squinting to discern any evidence of forward momentum, it wasn't a total failure. But it was pretty close and the game only reinforced how bad we are. From Oregon's first touchdown drive onward the game was in pick-the-score mode for the Ducks. The final margin was one befitting the #162 team, indicating that at least through five weeks the level of team we saw against Sacramento State and Oregon is about representative of where we are. Without significant improvement the rest of the way, this will probably be the worst team in school history.

2. The best thing we can say is that the team showed some grit to hang in there as long as they did while so comprehensively and massively outmatched. They made it further than they did against USC and than some teams have against Oregon. Still, the game showed how incredibly far we still have to go. Oregon has faced one of the most Charmin soft schedules in the nation (Portland State, Texas Tech, Hawaii, Colorado, and us) and even still we did worse than average in pass defense, run defense, and yards per play and on offense we had the lowest yards per play of any team to play Oregon this season, less even than Hawaii (#109 in yards per play in FBS) and Portland State (#61 in FCS). Yikes.

3. If one is inclined to dissect the game (and that's what I do with these posts, but fundamentally the story is a pretty simple one of one team totally outmatching the other), the story was that Oregon could do what it wanted on the ground. That shouldn't have surprised me as Oregon is #1 in the nation in yards per carry and we are #111 in yards per carry allowed, but seeing how little the defense looks like a Wisconsin defense continues to be disappointing. I know all the excuses in terms of talent and experience, but I think it's fair to say the defense has under-performed and that the defensive staff has not hit the ground running like good coaches sometimes do with defensive rebuilds (e.g., Gregory at Cal in 2002, Stoops at Arizona in 2004, Shafer at Stanford in 2007, Holt at Washington in 2009, Wilcox at Cal in 2017, Leavitt at Oregon in 2017). Perhaps I should have expected that with a first-time coordinator. I hope the defense gets better. An optimist might say that we've faced the top two scoring offenses in the country and it gets easier from here but a realist would point out that both Washington and Washington State are both top five as well and every game we have left is against an above-average scoring offense, though Colorado and Cal are average in advanced metrics.

4. On offense, the passing game hovered around Oregon's average in pass defense, which is depressing considering Colorado is the only decent passing attack the Ducks have faced, and the run game (which had been a bright spot of our season) abandoned us yesterday, doing a shade better than Colorado had but still under two yards per carry and the first game under this staff with less than 100 yards rushing. Pale's absence and not playing Smith more may be adversely impacting the run game and giving up a lot of sacks definitely continues to harm the run stats. There may also be an element of a wake-up call as we start to play Pac-12 teams, as we didn't have great run stats against Arizona either. In the post-game press conference, Taylor emphasized struggles in the red zone but those failures mirror our failures everywhere else on the field. It's not like we're getting the job done in the other 80 yards. I suppose Taylor's point may be that since we are so bad that elevates the importance of clawing out more points in the red zone in the rare events we're there.

Who had UofA crushing the Cougs and the Beavers handling UCLA


Oh, and I can’t believe I’m saying this but go ☘️

Boulder is at 5430 feet above sea level. The partial pressure of oxygen is low enough to affect stamina in non-acclimatized athletes. I'm really impressed that our guys seemed to be in better shape than their guys. As the game wore on we seemed to get better while CU looked exhausted.

Read that here.

Opening line.

Found StubHub tickets.

We had hopes of going to the Stanford versus Washington women’s soccer match this evening at 6 o’clock.

Tickets, including secondary sources are sold out.

Does anyone want to sell us their tickets?

Go Stanford.

Read that here.

Ironically, as some in here may know about my bet last year with @gary1221, I was at Sundance with some friends last night for dinner and watched the game there. We had them move us to a better TV viewing table once things got close out of nowhere.

The game ended about 45 mins - hour after close, but they let my group stay longer to watch the rest of the game, we were in there going crazy just ourselves and the staff. We closed down the place to a Stanford W. A night I will never forget.

Gary if you were there Id have bought you a lot more than just a ribeye. Again, a night I won't soon forget!

My family’s interested.

Just so ugly. We are so outclassed.

Read that here.

Read that here.

Great story.