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.
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.
