As others have said, the negativity on this board is becoming tiresome, but the bigger issue for me is that it isn't interesting. The argument inevitably boils down to "I disagree with Shaw's decisions. Therefore, Shaw has poor football judgement." But seeing as Shaw is the winningest coach in Stanford history and 4x Pac12 coach of the year, that seems like a pretty dubious conclusion at which to arrive. While it's certainly possible that Shaw is incompetent, shouldn't we at least consider the possibility that he's not?
I suggest it would be a more interesting analysis to assume Shaw has good judgement and work backwards to see what his decisions are telling us. Here's a structure that I've used previously when doing business analysis:
For example, surely Shaw understood that the extremely conservative playcalling in Q4 came with risks. However, he did have a 2 TD lead and an offense that was badly beat up with injuries. Is it possible his strategy was calling plays that were more likely to keep the team healthy even if that reduced the margin of victory (and increased the chance of losing)? Could the injury situation be worse than we know right now? But if this was the situation/strategy, why not just get KJ off the field entirely?
I suggest it would be a more interesting analysis to assume Shaw has good judgement and work backwards to see what his decisions are telling us. Here's a structure that I've used previously when doing business analysis:
Situation + Strategy + Judgement = Decision
I know way less about football than many of the posters here, so I'd be interested in hearing ideas about what combination of situation + strategy would cause you to make the same decisions Shaw has made.
For example, surely Shaw understood that the extremely conservative playcalling in Q4 came with risks. However, he did have a 2 TD lead and an offense that was badly beat up with injuries. Is it possible his strategy was calling plays that were more likely to keep the team healthy even if that reduced the margin of victory (and increased the chance of losing)? Could the injury situation be worse than we know right now? But if this was the situation/strategy, why not just get KJ off the field entirely?
