1. Consecutive wins! Doing that for the first time in the Taylor era produces a tangible sense of progress in the rebuild, and doing it in Stanford's first ACC game gives a sense of the page being turned to something new. Doing it in exciting fashion with a game-winning kick and a balanced performance in which each phase contributed and was entertaining makes it all the sweeter. Subjectively, it stands with last year's Colorado game as the most enjoyable Stanford football has been in a while. Objectively (based on quality of opponent/margin), it's the third best performance of the Taylor era after last year's Washington State win and Arizona loss (and a win is always a better result than a loss). We are still in the zone of dogged, glacial progress in this rebuild but, considering that we know this team's limitations, a road conference win against a decent opponent is a major cause of celebration.
2. The team showed resilience and competitiveness out the wazoo, which is becoming something we can rely on. The mentality of the program is a breath of fresh air compared to the last years under Shaw. It's a deeply flawed team but every unit battles and tries to claw out a chance. That's the plus side. The negative side is this team has to dig pretty deep just to compete against very mediocre opponents. Syracuse was extremely overrated by their AP #27 and coaches' poll #30 positions, which was already evident before the game from number crunching and is even more so now. Against such an opponent, we got outgained on a yards per play basis as we always do (last year's Arizona game remains the only time we've been more effective than a power conference opponent on this basis under Taylor) and did worse in yards per play on both sides of the ball than Syracuse's mediocre competition to date (Ohio and Georgia Tech) - much worse in the case of the offense but also worse on defense. Georgia Tech is an especially interesting benchmark as they are in the same general range of mediocrity as Syracuse and their game, like ours, happened in the Dome. By way of comparison, against Syracuse Georgia Tech had 2.8 points per meaningful drive and gave up 3.9 points per meaningful drive whereas we had 1.7 points per meaningful drive and gave up 2.0 points per meaningful drive. [For those wondering how we can win doing worse than an opponent in both points per drive and yards per play......pick six baby! Play of the game bar none.] The upshot is last night was a good, resilient, gutty, team win but still the performance of a bad team, not even close to how well a mediocre Georgia Tech team played against Syracuse in a losing effort.
3. All could see that, while it was a team effort, the defense clearly played better. Nobody is ever going to complain about 26 yards rushing and 1.53 yards per carry allowed to a conference opponent. Don't look now, the vaunted Wisconsin run defense for April we had been hoping for now is ranked ninth in the country in yards per carry allowed and third (!!!!) in rushing yards allowed per game. We did unambiguously better than Ohio and Georgia Tech, which are respectable run defenses and both gave up in the 126-134 yard range and 4.2 yards per carry. April is giving us reason to believe in the run defense. I think this is the biggest story of our season so far. I also want to tip my hat to the pass defense though, as it held McCord (a pretty underrated player for my money) to the lowest passer rating, yards per attempt, yards, completion percentage, and touchdowns (and most interceptions) he's had this young season. I am getting more optimistic about our pass defense. We've now played two of the best QBs we will play all season in Hoover and McCord and the pass defense did very similarly against both (big difference last night was of course getting two huge interceptions). Our national rankings on pass defense are ugly but I think there's a chance those rankings rise as degree of difficulty goes down substantially after next week.
4. The offense was much less impressive. TCU and Syracuse appear to have very similar passing defenses and our passing performance was almost identical in the two games. It appears Daniels is playing at a very consistent sub-par level, reinforced by our passing performance being much worse than the Ohio (bad QB) and Georgia Tech (very good QB) mustered against Syracuse. In the run game, our rushing stats were clearly the best we've had this season. However, as I always emphasize, the enemy gets a vote. Syracuse has atrocious run defense, now 127th in the nation. [But you know what's fun? Guess who the only Power Four team ranked worse in yards per carry allowed is: Clemson.] The truth is that we were under Syracuse's average in yards per carry allowed and rushing yards per game allowed and PFF gave us our lowest run blocking grade of the season (and of course our run blocking grades had already been terrible). I like what some of the receivers and the freshmen running backs give us but the OL is still an enormous, dispiriting problem.
5. He's not as big of a problem as the OL but Daniels is also a problem. Last night's performance was seventh of the eight QBs who've played so far this week in Total QBR and wouldn't have cracked the top 80 any week this season (nor do I expect it to this week). On the season, Daniels is 110th of 133 QBs after being 85th of 127 last year. As I have observed in the past, Total QBR and PFF often don't see eye-to-eye on QBs. PFF likes Daniels much more, slotting him as top 38 percent of QBs nationally, significant improvement over being top 80 percent last year. I don't put a lot of stock into these until the sample sizes are bigger, just giving a snapshot of how metrics I find interesting assess Daniels' play so far. As usual with regard to QBs, the Total QBR conforms more closely with my subjective sense. By the eye test, it just seemed like he left so much meat on the bone with overthrows to Ayomanor (and one underthrow and one spectacular touchdown that was actually overthrown and saved by Ayomanor's greatness), and of course two very bad interceptions that showed poor judgment. He also doesn't have good pocket sense and even some of his athletic leaving of the pocket abandons clean pockets. Ultimately, I think the offense is getting marginally better than it was last year but not because of Daniels (rather because modest improvement from an egregious baseline at OL and because we actually trust our running backs to hand them the ball sometimes). As the rest of the offense hopefully improves, I think Daniels places a lackluster ceiling on this team. Of course, fans will react to that with despair that Brown is out for a month or two with the hand injury. It's hard to escape that what we've seen so far this year makes it very enticing to see what Brown could do.
2. The team showed resilience and competitiveness out the wazoo, which is becoming something we can rely on. The mentality of the program is a breath of fresh air compared to the last years under Shaw. It's a deeply flawed team but every unit battles and tries to claw out a chance. That's the plus side. The negative side is this team has to dig pretty deep just to compete against very mediocre opponents. Syracuse was extremely overrated by their AP #27 and coaches' poll #30 positions, which was already evident before the game from number crunching and is even more so now. Against such an opponent, we got outgained on a yards per play basis as we always do (last year's Arizona game remains the only time we've been more effective than a power conference opponent on this basis under Taylor) and did worse in yards per play on both sides of the ball than Syracuse's mediocre competition to date (Ohio and Georgia Tech) - much worse in the case of the offense but also worse on defense. Georgia Tech is an especially interesting benchmark as they are in the same general range of mediocrity as Syracuse and their game, like ours, happened in the Dome. By way of comparison, against Syracuse Georgia Tech had 2.8 points per meaningful drive and gave up 3.9 points per meaningful drive whereas we had 1.7 points per meaningful drive and gave up 2.0 points per meaningful drive. [For those wondering how we can win doing worse than an opponent in both points per drive and yards per play......pick six baby! Play of the game bar none.] The upshot is last night was a good, resilient, gutty, team win but still the performance of a bad team, not even close to how well a mediocre Georgia Tech team played against Syracuse in a losing effort.
3. All could see that, while it was a team effort, the defense clearly played better. Nobody is ever going to complain about 26 yards rushing and 1.53 yards per carry allowed to a conference opponent. Don't look now, the vaunted Wisconsin run defense for April we had been hoping for now is ranked ninth in the country in yards per carry allowed and third (!!!!) in rushing yards allowed per game. We did unambiguously better than Ohio and Georgia Tech, which are respectable run defenses and both gave up in the 126-134 yard range and 4.2 yards per carry. April is giving us reason to believe in the run defense. I think this is the biggest story of our season so far. I also want to tip my hat to the pass defense though, as it held McCord (a pretty underrated player for my money) to the lowest passer rating, yards per attempt, yards, completion percentage, and touchdowns (and most interceptions) he's had this young season. I am getting more optimistic about our pass defense. We've now played two of the best QBs we will play all season in Hoover and McCord and the pass defense did very similarly against both (big difference last night was of course getting two huge interceptions). Our national rankings on pass defense are ugly but I think there's a chance those rankings rise as degree of difficulty goes down substantially after next week.
4. The offense was much less impressive. TCU and Syracuse appear to have very similar passing defenses and our passing performance was almost identical in the two games. It appears Daniels is playing at a very consistent sub-par level, reinforced by our passing performance being much worse than the Ohio (bad QB) and Georgia Tech (very good QB) mustered against Syracuse. In the run game, our rushing stats were clearly the best we've had this season. However, as I always emphasize, the enemy gets a vote. Syracuse has atrocious run defense, now 127th in the nation. [But you know what's fun? Guess who the only Power Four team ranked worse in yards per carry allowed is: Clemson.] The truth is that we were under Syracuse's average in yards per carry allowed and rushing yards per game allowed and PFF gave us our lowest run blocking grade of the season (and of course our run blocking grades had already been terrible). I like what some of the receivers and the freshmen running backs give us but the OL is still an enormous, dispiriting problem.
5. He's not as big of a problem as the OL but Daniels is also a problem. Last night's performance was seventh of the eight QBs who've played so far this week in Total QBR and wouldn't have cracked the top 80 any week this season (nor do I expect it to this week). On the season, Daniels is 110th of 133 QBs after being 85th of 127 last year. As I have observed in the past, Total QBR and PFF often don't see eye-to-eye on QBs. PFF likes Daniels much more, slotting him as top 38 percent of QBs nationally, significant improvement over being top 80 percent last year. I don't put a lot of stock into these until the sample sizes are bigger, just giving a snapshot of how metrics I find interesting assess Daniels' play so far. As usual with regard to QBs, the Total QBR conforms more closely with my subjective sense. By the eye test, it just seemed like he left so much meat on the bone with overthrows to Ayomanor (and one underthrow and one spectacular touchdown that was actually overthrown and saved by Ayomanor's greatness), and of course two very bad interceptions that showed poor judgment. He also doesn't have good pocket sense and even some of his athletic leaving of the pocket abandons clean pockets. Ultimately, I think the offense is getting marginally better than it was last year but not because of Daniels (rather because modest improvement from an egregious baseline at OL and because we actually trust our running backs to hand them the ball sometimes). As the rest of the offense hopefully improves, I think Daniels places a lackluster ceiling on this team. Of course, fans will react to that with despair that Brown is out for a month or two with the hand injury. It's hard to escape that what we've seen so far this year makes it very enticing to see what Brown could do.
