Interesting and crazy article from WSJ on the recruitment of Bryce Underwood (free link hopefully holds up). Aside from all the $$$ from Larry Ellison's wife, Michigan got Tom Brady to call him "two or three times per week". That's pretty amazing, but maybe Stanford can counter with Luck, who's actually part of the daily football operations.

Another tidbit on the $$ in college football:

Altogether, Jay Underwood said he expected his son’s earnings to exceed $15 million during his Michigan career.

Click to expand...

Read that here.

Read that here.

1. Welp, four consecutive three win seasons it is. We are now entering the chat with teams like 2016-2019 Rutgers, 2013-2016 Iowa State, 2000-2004 Vanderbilt, and 1991-1994 Northwestern. We're not yet (un)worthy of the early 2000s Duke comparison. There's generally room for one team this hapless at a time and right now, unhappily, it's us. We will see when other teams finish their seasons where we end in the final analysis for algorithmic rankings like Sagarin and SP+ but it is now settled we essentially repeated the quality of Taylor's first season, which is to say one of our five worst seasons of all time and two seasons in a row to start the Taylor era that are our worst since 2006. I don't think the coaching staff has shown enough for us to have any confidence in the rebuild and I think it would be defensible to pull the plug on this staff and start over but that is not going to happen. Instead, I expect attention to focus on the fundamentals of university support and mindset shifts to grapple with the new landscape of college football. That is also defensible and probably focusing on the root of the issue more than trying to take another ride on the coaching carousel two years into an attempted rebuild.

2. Analyzing yet another game not worthy of a Power Four team seems somewhat beside the point when the season's shape is so well known at this point and we are all wanting to turn the page to a new Andrew Luck era. But for the sake of completeness I'll go through my process here. In the last game of the season, we played San Jose State like a middle of the pack Group of Five team, which is indeed the level of play we've had generally this season. That would have been just enough to win if we hadn't shot ourselves in the foot so much. Alas, we threw three interceptions (one essentially a punt, one arguably just how the ball bounces, and one completely inexcusable that cost us the game), scored zero points after having a first down from the three yard line, and, after a season of discipline in not committing penalties, racked up a whopping 10 penalties for 115 yards, which must rank extremely high on the all-time list for Stanford football. You have to go back 117 games to the UCF game in 2015 to find Stanford so undisciplined in a game. Hard to win committing that many penalties unless you are clearly superior to the opponent, as our 2015 team was. The 2024 Stanford Cardinal are not superior to San Jose State.

3. We weren't better than San Jose State and we weren't worse either. This game was an appropriate conclusion to the season in that it was deeply representative of the level of team we had this year. In this contest, we had 2.4 points per drive, making the #61 points per drive defense look like the #82 yards defense, and a middle of the road performance in yards per play compared to San Jose State opponents (five teams gained better than us, six gained worse). We had our third highest yards per play of our FBS season but that should be expected against the third worst defense we played according to SP+. On defense, we gave up 2.82 points per drive, making the #89 points per drive offense look like the #26 points per drive offense, though if you dock seven points from San Jose State due to our defensive touchdown that is 2.18 points per drive, akin to the #76 points per drive offense. This was the second worst offense we played this season according to SP+ yet only our sixth best yards per play defensive game. The most I can say for the defensive performance is it was better than a fair number of Group of Five defenses, as seven teams gave up more yards per play to San Jose State this year and four gave up less. Put simply, on both sides of the ball we looked like a fairly typical Mountain West team.

4. In terms of individual phases of the game, we were relatively best at run defense followed by run game followed by pass defense followed by passing offense. Pretty typical for us. San Jose State has an atrocious run game and predictably could not get anything going against us. Because they are so bad at this our 58 yards allowed performance doesn't even stand out that much and in fact five teams have held the Spartans to even fewer yards per carry than we did. Still, we kept them significantly under their season average. We are now 72nd in yards per carry allowed, cementing run defense as a relative strength of the 2024 team. Improving nearly 30 spots in the national rankings is vastly more sign of improvement than we've shown in any other major respect. It is an open question whether we can sustain that progress losing Sinclair, Bernadel, and Phillips but we should acknowledge an area of clear improvement, especially when there have been so few. One can't be positive about our own run game in the face of that bleak stat that we just went an entire season without a running back scoring a rushing touchdown but in the land of the blind the one eyed man with cataracts is landed gentry. Against San Jose State, our run game was middle of the road compared to the Spartans' Mountain West schedule, the seventh highest yards per carry they've allowed. The pass defense held the Spartans to their ninth most yards per attempt but unfortunately gave up so many touchdowns that it swamped that effort, with only three teams allowing a passer rating as high as we did. And then there's our own passing. Sacramento State, Air Force, and Kennesaw State were the only teams to have fewer yards per attempt or a lower passer rating against the Spartans. There is no surprise here that we are a terrible passing team but I do think it drives it home to have two receivers capable of 100 yard receiving performances in the same game and still be so much worse than Mountain West teams at passing.

Read that here.

MWP - 1st round NCAA tournament vs Princeton
WVB - 1st round NCAA tournament vs Sac State
WSOC - College cup semi-final vs Wake Forest

15 flat is amazingly fast. Especially for a college runner. More especially for a 19 year old.

Words escape me...


I'm listening to The Michael Kay Show and they are speculating that because NIL is now administered by schools, perhaps this is a tax-deductible donation to BYU. "Traditional" NIL collective money is not tax-deductible.

Read that here.

1. Frustrating missed opportunity to make this season feel like progress. It always stinks to lose Big Game but considering this year's team has been one of the worst in Stanford history I was actually somewhat encouraged to see us play a mediocre team more or less credibly in all phases. This year we ended up playing the solid but not great echelon of our schedule - TCU, Syracuse, Virginia Tech, Louisville, Cal - fairly competently, with the Virginia Tech game the only embarrassing one. It has been the weak FBS teams - Wake Forest and NC State - where we beclowned ourselves (which hopefully we can partially redeem against San Jose State). As inexcusable as it is to be the #97 team in the country, at least the last two games have been among our best of the season. [Our games this year have been befitting the #74, #65, #34, #115, #169, #144, #155, #118, #201, #27, and #54 teams in the nation.] With a product this bad one always has to look for signs of rot and demoralization so it is perhaps salutary that we have a chance to end the season on three relatively high notes. Nonetheless, it stings to miss the opportunity to change the narrative away from what seems like an increasingly hopeless program the longer this miserable string of three win seasons goes on.

2. A Big Game loss blowing an 11 point fourth quarter lead (14 points with a minute left in the third) will swamp any impulse to look at silver linings. They were there though. On the scoreboard, we scored 2.1 points per non-garbage drive, making the #39 points per drive defense look like the #58 point per drive defense and putting more points on the board than six Cal opponents, and we also gave up fewer points than six Cal opponents. The defense nearly beat out the Wake Forest game for the best yards per per play performance of the year (and Cal has a better offense than Wake), the fourth best a defense has done against Cal in both yards per play and scoring. We partied in the backfield 11 times, tied with last year's UCLA game for the most we've had in more than a decade (that is, since actual #PartyInTheBackfield days). We didn't commit a turnover (though I wouldn't crow too much about that as Daniels seemed pretty ball insecure). There were good things in this game. Of course, there were bad things too, in particular Weselman's catastrophic botched hold, the passing game after the first quarter, giving up a 50 yard QB run (and even more yardage due to a penalty), and giving up three 30 yard passes (two in the fourth quarter). But we looked like a mediocre team that came up a play short (pick any of those five I just mentioned or add a well-timed one for the passing game), which is a far cry from the terrible team we have been the vast majority of the time this season.

3. Cal has a great yards per play defense, #21 in the nation, and true to form the three stingiest defenses we faced in 2024 - Notre Dame, SMU, and Cal - were the three against which we had the most trouble getting yards per play. While it is understandable we would struggle to move the ball against Cal, our offensive struggles went beyond that, with only Oregon State struggling more than we did to gain yards. That means that FCS UC Davis and some of the worst offenses in FBS in Florida State, San Diego State, and Wake Forest all had more yards per play than we did. I am not going to sugarcoat that except to say we do get credit for scoring at a respectable clip, even with the (decisive two times over) six points left off the board due to the times we lined up for a field goal and got nothing. Our passing numbers were very ugly - and the touchdown was a trick play QB1 wasn't even on the field for - but Cal has one of the best pass defenses we play and we did marginally better in the air than we had against other tough pass defenses (Notre Dame, Clemson, TCU, SMU). We also had a better passer rating than five Cal opponents, though only better than two (including UC Davis) in yards per attempt. The passing performance was not good but some consideration needs to be given to opponent. Even more consideration needs to be given to opponent in terms of the run game as Cal has a great rushing defense - 14th in the nation - so we can be largely forgiven for the limited running efficacy. We were pretty middle of the road in terms of how teams run against Cal. I will take middle of the road as a positive since we have mostly been bad at rushing in the Taylor era. In short, our offense wasn't good but it was better than it usually is.

4. As I noted above, the defense did the fourth best a defense has done against Cal in both scoring and yards. On a points per drive basis it was a bit less impressive - 2.67 points per non-garbage drive, making the #71 points per drive offense look like the #31 points per drive offense - but by and large this was a defensive performance I will take. Cal has a very solid passing attack and we held them under our season average in passer rating allowed and yards per attempt allowed. Pass defense still ended up being a vulnerability for us (we did better than only 2-3 other teams in defending Cal's passing game) because good by our standards is still bad - on the season we are 127th in defensive passer rating and 126th in yards per attempt allowed. Still, we should acknowledge when we play better than our norm. In the run game, Syracuse is the only FBS team our run defense has bottled up more. Obviously all the partying in the backfield had a big hand in that. We held Cal under their season average, which was already quite pitiful. [This is the only time our run defense has done that in the last five games after starting the year with six consecutive such games. We are now 78th in yards per carry allowed, a relative strength of the team compared to being 107th in yards per carry, 113th in passer rating, and 127th in defensive passer rating. As I noted last week, though, there is nothing we are good at.] The big plays Nicholson and Wright gave up played a role in the loss but overall I don't think this was such a bad defensive performance.

Read that here. Looks like Stanford will be going after Princeton offensive lineman Tommy Matheson in the transfer portal. He's 6'4", 305 pounds and is a graduate transfer. So he could have some value. Houston and Duke on him as well. Of course, I think Stanford needs to be able to do more than just add Ivy grad transfers. Especially in football. But nonetheless, given the need for immediate upgrades at offensive line, it would make sense for them to go after him.

Read and watch that here.

Starting this thread. OSU vs Indiana on Fox: Is Indiana real?