If you listen to Shaw's Tuesday press conference and post-game interview you can see the outlines of what he's telling and/or will tell administrators, donors, and media: Stanford is experiencing a brutal spate of injuries on both sides of the ball and that's the explanation for our nightmare season. It's a perfect storm just like 2019 and when he's had a modicum of health for his roster he has been the winningest coach in our history. Even last year is part of the narrative that Shaw excels when he has any sort of cards to play with: we went 4-2 against an all-conference game schedule and gutted our way to a storybook Road Dog season busting off four wins on the road in a grinding pandemic, with it being easy to imagine 5-1 or even 6-0 had Davis Mills and Connor Wedington not been screwed out of the beginning of their season. In this view, the story of Stanford's bowl-less streak is simply a story of unreal bad luck in 2019 and 2021. Watching our national broadcast of the Utah game or the Pac-12 broadcast of the Oregon State game (or as I understand it listening to the radio broadcasts) you hear this credulous narrative over and over again of a depleted roster as hamstrung by injuries as any team in the nation.
This narrative is bogus. Let me count the ways:
1) The 2020 season was not an oasis in the desert but rather a mirage. The 2020 season was in the same category of bad, irrelevant football as what preceded and succeeded it. It's just that sometimes there isn't a difference between a 2-4 team and a 4-2 team other than variance. Sagarin pegged the 2019 team #73, 2020 #75, and 2021 (with the season not yet complete) #78. It's the same thing year after year at this point. This feels like a reckoning because sometimes evidence accumulating makes something sink in more but, fundamentally, bad, irrelevant football has become a steady state for Stanford football.
2) "Perfect storm" explanations become less persuasive the more times you have to use them. The Boy Who Cried Wolf is a famous fable for a reason. No matter how much one might sympathize with elements of the excuses for 2019 and 2021, it's just a simple matter of math and psychology that the salience of the excuse diminishes the more you have to use it. The reason a hundred year storm is a powerful image is because it speaks to its rarity and flukiness. If we're in a situation where hundred year storms happen every few years we have to recognize that that's not biblical bad luck but rather a function of human-caused changes to the atmosphere. The way Shaw runs the program, recruits, oversees strength and conditioning, or some other factor/combination of factors may be making us more susceptible to the ravages of injuries, but if so that doesn't change that he's overseeing this and is responsible for it.
3) The one injury this year that undoubtedly has been most impactful is McKee. In the quintessential team sport with 22 starting positions (33 if you count special teams as a full phase of the game) and 85 allowed scholarships, a team should really take a hard look in the mirror if the absence of one (freshman!) player (who started the year on the bench!) has this devastating an impact. If we are this bad without McKee, that says awful things about what the program looks like in the medium to long term with this coaching staff. That is doubly true because we've had two recruiting classes in a row post-McKee not recruiting the QB position at McKee's level. An apologist would argue that a veteran Patu post-McKee looks a lot different than a true freshman Patu but as far as November 13, 2021 goes, there is no plausible rejoinder to the argument that Shaw had full control of the management of the QB pipeline and made decisions that led to the lack of a QB in 2019, the lack of a non-LDS QB in 2020, and the passing over of more highly-touted prospects in 2021. Patu may one day be great but Shaw fully owns the reality and consequences of the state of our QB room.
4) There is another fundamental problem with any argument that puts the ineptitude of the last few weeks primarily at the feet of McKee's injury: we weren't good even with McKee! Before the Washington game (McKee's last start) we were Sagarin #56. Earlier in October we reached #45. In other words, when McKee, Tremayne, Higgins, Humphreys, Kelly, Miezan, Herron, etc. were playing we were an irrelevant, mediocre team akin to Buddy Teevens' teams. A critic of Shaw can entirely stipulate that the second half of this season can be written off due to injuries and that still wouldn't excuse the quality of product Shaw was putting on the field. Without the injury narrative we were still not good.
5) The biggest reason for that, exposing the injury narrative as the cynical excuse it is, is that this team's failures are much more attributable to weakness in the trenches than they are to injury absences. Injuries have been concentrated at RB, WR, and DB. But the badness of this year hasn't been mainly due to the skill positions but rather due to getting blown off the line of scrimmage. The offensive line is #126 in Line Yards and #106 in Sack Rate. The defensive line is #127 in Line Yards and #113 in Sack Rate. THAT is why we suck. The line of scrimmage. And you know what? There is no injury excuse for what's ailing us in the trenches. The top five snap totals on the offense all belong to the Week One starting offensive line. Were it not for Bragg's presumed COVID-19 absence early in the season and Hinton missing a handful of plays they'd have been healthy almost continuously this year. Their struggles are not about injuries. On defense, Booker, Wade-Perry, and Johnson have played every game and not been part of the medical bay. There is an obvious (to both the naked eye and to the statistically minded) explanation for our mediocrity with McKee and terribleness without him - the offensive and defensive lines - and problems there have not been about this convenient but wrong narrative about injuries.
Nobody should buy the narrative that injuries explain the program's decline. QED.
This narrative is bogus. Let me count the ways:
1) The 2020 season was not an oasis in the desert but rather a mirage. The 2020 season was in the same category of bad, irrelevant football as what preceded and succeeded it. It's just that sometimes there isn't a difference between a 2-4 team and a 4-2 team other than variance. Sagarin pegged the 2019 team #73, 2020 #75, and 2021 (with the season not yet complete) #78. It's the same thing year after year at this point. This feels like a reckoning because sometimes evidence accumulating makes something sink in more but, fundamentally, bad, irrelevant football has become a steady state for Stanford football.
2) "Perfect storm" explanations become less persuasive the more times you have to use them. The Boy Who Cried Wolf is a famous fable for a reason. No matter how much one might sympathize with elements of the excuses for 2019 and 2021, it's just a simple matter of math and psychology that the salience of the excuse diminishes the more you have to use it. The reason a hundred year storm is a powerful image is because it speaks to its rarity and flukiness. If we're in a situation where hundred year storms happen every few years we have to recognize that that's not biblical bad luck but rather a function of human-caused changes to the atmosphere. The way Shaw runs the program, recruits, oversees strength and conditioning, or some other factor/combination of factors may be making us more susceptible to the ravages of injuries, but if so that doesn't change that he's overseeing this and is responsible for it.
3) The one injury this year that undoubtedly has been most impactful is McKee. In the quintessential team sport with 22 starting positions (33 if you count special teams as a full phase of the game) and 85 allowed scholarships, a team should really take a hard look in the mirror if the absence of one (freshman!) player (who started the year on the bench!) has this devastating an impact. If we are this bad without McKee, that says awful things about what the program looks like in the medium to long term with this coaching staff. That is doubly true because we've had two recruiting classes in a row post-McKee not recruiting the QB position at McKee's level. An apologist would argue that a veteran Patu post-McKee looks a lot different than a true freshman Patu but as far as November 13, 2021 goes, there is no plausible rejoinder to the argument that Shaw had full control of the management of the QB pipeline and made decisions that led to the lack of a QB in 2019, the lack of a non-LDS QB in 2020, and the passing over of more highly-touted prospects in 2021. Patu may one day be great but Shaw fully owns the reality and consequences of the state of our QB room.
4) There is another fundamental problem with any argument that puts the ineptitude of the last few weeks primarily at the feet of McKee's injury: we weren't good even with McKee! Before the Washington game (McKee's last start) we were Sagarin #56. Earlier in October we reached #45. In other words, when McKee, Tremayne, Higgins, Humphreys, Kelly, Miezan, Herron, etc. were playing we were an irrelevant, mediocre team akin to Buddy Teevens' teams. A critic of Shaw can entirely stipulate that the second half of this season can be written off due to injuries and that still wouldn't excuse the quality of product Shaw was putting on the field. Without the injury narrative we were still not good.
5) The biggest reason for that, exposing the injury narrative as the cynical excuse it is, is that this team's failures are much more attributable to weakness in the trenches than they are to injury absences. Injuries have been concentrated at RB, WR, and DB. But the badness of this year hasn't been mainly due to the skill positions but rather due to getting blown off the line of scrimmage. The offensive line is #126 in Line Yards and #106 in Sack Rate. The defensive line is #127 in Line Yards and #113 in Sack Rate. THAT is why we suck. The line of scrimmage. And you know what? There is no injury excuse for what's ailing us in the trenches. The top five snap totals on the offense all belong to the Week One starting offensive line. Were it not for Bragg's presumed COVID-19 absence early in the season and Hinton missing a handful of plays they'd have been healthy almost continuously this year. Their struggles are not about injuries. On defense, Booker, Wade-Perry, and Johnson have played every game and not been part of the medical bay. There is an obvious (to both the naked eye and to the statistically minded) explanation for our mediocrity with McKee and terribleness without him - the offensive and defensive lines - and problems there have not been about this convenient but wrong narrative about injuries.
Nobody should buy the narrative that injuries explain the program's decline. QED.
