1. Make it stop. Every week is the same. We don't belong on the field with real teams. We're no more of a test than Louisiana, UAB, or Weber State would be. Injuries and the transfer portal can't explain that. Things have gotten so bleak that one has to ask what the point even is. This is not fun for anybody. If a school is going to field a football team it really owes it to itself (not to mention the players and fans) to at least try to have a product that has some purpose. That's the fundamental thing that bothers me about the most unambitious sentiments: even if one were to grant that Stanford can never again be competitive (which is BS), what's stopping us from trying to give the program/players/fans a chance at something that isn't joyless?
2. I was glad to hear Muir was in Rice-Eccles for the carnage. The tv broadcast did no favors to those of us who care about Stanford football and have some standards. The clueless announcers (we know they were clueless because they didn't know the slow mesh was an intentional/core part of Stanford's offense, didn't mention that Gabe Reid was a former Stanford player, and generally added very little color) all but waved the white flag on Stanford ever having a relevant program again. Any Shawpologist or surrender monkey watching would have felt entirely vindicated by supposedly expert commentators taking it as a given that this isn't Shaw's fault and it will be up to him to dig Stanford out of its hole and by those commentators then aggressively managing expectations with assertions that the transfer portal makes it impossible for Stanford to compete. This narrative may be the greatest threat to the future of Stanford football. So many people inside and outside the program seem to have succumbed to the defeatism. This narrative needs to be punctured. For what it's worth, here are the win totals (listed parenthetically) for the 11 Power Five programs with three or fewer incoming transfers this past off-season: Ohio State (10), Michigan (10), Clemson (9), Penn State (8), Oregon State (7), NC State (7), Iowa (6), Baylor (6), Iowa State (4), Texas A&M (3), Stanford (3). We are no more incapable of competing in major college football than Oregon State, NC State, or Iowa. That we do not compete under Shaw is about Shaw.
3. For several years Shaw's teams have reminded me of the Teevens/Harris teams. That's the level we are right now, at best (in terms of the team's overall competitiveness it's an insult to Teevens to compare 2019-2022 Shaw to Teevens). Two of the parallels in some of our recent games have been a spirited defense that fights for a while before being beaten down as it has no chance given the offensive ineptitude, and an ostensibly NFL talent quarterback getting sacked every few drop backs and increasingly looking like a shell of himself. This game had those parallels in spades. As usual, it added up to a totally uncompetitive game in which the defense battled to a point but eventually crumbled and the offense deserves more of our scorn. Utah has now scored 42+ points in four of their seven conference games, so other defenses have been scorched too, but there are zero Pac-12 teams that had failed to score 13+ points on Utah until Stanford did it. And seven points may overstate the offense's quality yesterday as the long Higgins catch in the first quarter was the only way we had a prayer of scoring at all. After all, including the first half touchdown we only had three first downs in the first half! [This week's moving the chains (first down) leader board: Higgins (3), McKee (2), Hawkins, Humphreys, Leigber (Tremayne drew a pass interference)] Utah had two individual players with more total offense than Stanford's entire team combined! As bad as Shawfense always is, Utah has a way of bringing out special levels of ineptitude - for the second straight year Utah is the one team against which Stanford can't even muster 4 yards per play.
4. While the strongest derision should be directed at the offense, we shouldn't overstate the quality of the defensive performance. That was the most yards per play we've given up since USC and the most Utah has had against any FBS opponent. The run defense continues to perform (horrific) wonders, this time giving up 7.75 yards rushing per carry (nearly two yards more than the next worst all season against Utah). That's three games in a row giving up more than 7 yards per carry. On the season, we are 128th in the country after being 127th last year and 112th in 2020. Pass defense is sometimes a relative bright spot and relatively speaking it was again as at least we held Utah under their average in yards per attempt and passer rating, but even then it was our worst pass defense game in five games by most metrics and Utah's best in the last three games. Combining stats with the eye test it's clear that what actually happened is that Rising has been slumping for nearly a month and Utah knew well that they didn't need him or anybody else to be crisp to beat us by 35 points. The quality of our pass defense, as usual, is an irrelevance in the broader context of the overall system failure.
5. That's the reality we're again cruelly reminded of: this is comprehensive, system-wide, catastrophic failure. Looking at it from the vantage of this game, we had 0.7 points per drive and Utah had 4.2 points per drive, meaning that we made the #57 points per drive defense look like the #1 defense in the nation (Michigan at 0.87 is the only defense that gives up less than a point per drive) and we made the #14 points per drive offense look like the #1 offense in the nation (Oregon at 4.12 and Ohio State at 4.03 are the only offenses that get more than four points per drive). As happens all too often, that's a mark of failure that bears re-reading: on both offense and defense we let Utah play at a level that would be tops in the nation. Looking at all this from the vantage of the full season, it's similarly bleak as we are 111th in scoring offense and 114th in scoring defense. We'll see where FEI ends up, but heading into this game (obviously our rankings will drop further once algorithms update) we had the #98 Offensive FEI and #78 Defensive FEI. There's nothing worth saving. Full-on system failure.
2. I was glad to hear Muir was in Rice-Eccles for the carnage. The tv broadcast did no favors to those of us who care about Stanford football and have some standards. The clueless announcers (we know they were clueless because they didn't know the slow mesh was an intentional/core part of Stanford's offense, didn't mention that Gabe Reid was a former Stanford player, and generally added very little color) all but waved the white flag on Stanford ever having a relevant program again. Any Shawpologist or surrender monkey watching would have felt entirely vindicated by supposedly expert commentators taking it as a given that this isn't Shaw's fault and it will be up to him to dig Stanford out of its hole and by those commentators then aggressively managing expectations with assertions that the transfer portal makes it impossible for Stanford to compete. This narrative may be the greatest threat to the future of Stanford football. So many people inside and outside the program seem to have succumbed to the defeatism. This narrative needs to be punctured. For what it's worth, here are the win totals (listed parenthetically) for the 11 Power Five programs with three or fewer incoming transfers this past off-season: Ohio State (10), Michigan (10), Clemson (9), Penn State (8), Oregon State (7), NC State (7), Iowa (6), Baylor (6), Iowa State (4), Texas A&M (3), Stanford (3). We are no more incapable of competing in major college football than Oregon State, NC State, or Iowa. That we do not compete under Shaw is about Shaw.
3. For several years Shaw's teams have reminded me of the Teevens/Harris teams. That's the level we are right now, at best (in terms of the team's overall competitiveness it's an insult to Teevens to compare 2019-2022 Shaw to Teevens). Two of the parallels in some of our recent games have been a spirited defense that fights for a while before being beaten down as it has no chance given the offensive ineptitude, and an ostensibly NFL talent quarterback getting sacked every few drop backs and increasingly looking like a shell of himself. This game had those parallels in spades. As usual, it added up to a totally uncompetitive game in which the defense battled to a point but eventually crumbled and the offense deserves more of our scorn. Utah has now scored 42+ points in four of their seven conference games, so other defenses have been scorched too, but there are zero Pac-12 teams that had failed to score 13+ points on Utah until Stanford did it. And seven points may overstate the offense's quality yesterday as the long Higgins catch in the first quarter was the only way we had a prayer of scoring at all. After all, including the first half touchdown we only had three first downs in the first half! [This week's moving the chains (first down) leader board: Higgins (3), McKee (2), Hawkins, Humphreys, Leigber (Tremayne drew a pass interference)] Utah had two individual players with more total offense than Stanford's entire team combined! As bad as Shawfense always is, Utah has a way of bringing out special levels of ineptitude - for the second straight year Utah is the one team against which Stanford can't even muster 4 yards per play.
4. While the strongest derision should be directed at the offense, we shouldn't overstate the quality of the defensive performance. That was the most yards per play we've given up since USC and the most Utah has had against any FBS opponent. The run defense continues to perform (horrific) wonders, this time giving up 7.75 yards rushing per carry (nearly two yards more than the next worst all season against Utah). That's three games in a row giving up more than 7 yards per carry. On the season, we are 128th in the country after being 127th last year and 112th in 2020. Pass defense is sometimes a relative bright spot and relatively speaking it was again as at least we held Utah under their average in yards per attempt and passer rating, but even then it was our worst pass defense game in five games by most metrics and Utah's best in the last three games. Combining stats with the eye test it's clear that what actually happened is that Rising has been slumping for nearly a month and Utah knew well that they didn't need him or anybody else to be crisp to beat us by 35 points. The quality of our pass defense, as usual, is an irrelevance in the broader context of the overall system failure.
5. That's the reality we're again cruelly reminded of: this is comprehensive, system-wide, catastrophic failure. Looking at it from the vantage of this game, we had 0.7 points per drive and Utah had 4.2 points per drive, meaning that we made the #57 points per drive defense look like the #1 defense in the nation (Michigan at 0.87 is the only defense that gives up less than a point per drive) and we made the #14 points per drive offense look like the #1 offense in the nation (Oregon at 4.12 and Ohio State at 4.03 are the only offenses that get more than four points per drive). As happens all too often, that's a mark of failure that bears re-reading: on both offense and defense we let Utah play at a level that would be tops in the nation. Looking at all this from the vantage of the full season, it's similarly bleak as we are 111th in scoring offense and 114th in scoring defense. We'll see where FEI ends up, but heading into this game (obviously our rankings will drop further once algorithms update) we had the #98 Offensive FEI and #78 Defensive FEI. There's nothing worth saving. Full-on system failure.
