1. Yesterday was a low point for Stanford football. One of the most mediocre teams in Power Five football - a 4-4 Washington State team that hasn't had a regular season better than 6-6 since 2018 - came into our house and picked the score. Beyond the abject uncompetitiveness (itself not a rare occasion for us, which is a big part of why this is another low point), it was another joyless Saturday on campus that begs the question of why we field a team and pour resources into it if we're not going to give it a chance of being relevant or fun. A few thousand people bothered to show up and by the final whistle there were probably more people at field level than in the rest of the stadium. Many of the most vocal who showed up expressed themselves sartorially with garb that Stanford Hates Fun. That meme, comically and short-sightedly boosted by a school more eager to censor criticism than address the roots of it, went national as the much-watched talking heads on ESPN's College GameDay mocked us for the laughingstock our no fun allowed administration, losing football ways, and mausoleum of a football stadium have rightfully made us. It's hard to say whether this is THE low point for Stanford football. Going a year without a major college football win was low. So was the string of obliterations (173-46!) to end last year. Before Shaw's time, so were multiple moments in Walt Harris' reign of terror, or the 1983 season, or the 1960 season. The point is that Shaw has now strung together a couple of years of low points that rival the lowest moments in program history. If there is still somebody out there who tolerates the idea of David Shaw coaching at Stanford next season (including David Shaw) I don't believe they have the best interests of the players, fans, or university at heart.
2. That being said, those who don't feel sorry for Shaw need to work on their empathy. This tarnishing of the legacy of an accomplished and decent man is brutal. It's painful to watch him process all this and gamely go before cameras and do the public-facing aspects of his job. He plainly doesn't know why he's failed or what he could possibly do to stop failing. In the press conference he talked about how ultimately he's accountable and how that's the easy part but the hard part is knowing how to get the most out of our players. To reach the mountaintop, tumble to the seas, and have no idea how to make it back to shore, much less start climbing again, must be excruciating. I have to imagine it's traumatic and, at a bare minimum, comes with coping mechanisms that border on the delusional. When asked about how the coaches are handling all of this, he offered a meditation on how all you can do is just do the job. On some level I think a coach I've always viewed as excessively deontological has coped with failure by becoming even more relentlessly, all-consumingly dedicated to a philosophy of "the means justify the ends." What else can he do but put together the game plan Sunday night, focus on fundamentals during the week, and appeal to the pride of the team to execute on Saturday? But another phrase for this is going through the motions. And I think that wears on even Shaw. It was startling to me to see him in the press conference forget Ron Gould and Kendall Williamson's names. Seemed like PTSD. Deep down I don't care how philosophical one is, a football coach can't sustain his soul on deontology alone. The mounting toll of the losses and the garbage ways they happen will weigh on anybody. To use another metaphor, after falling from the mountaintop Shaw settled at the base camp and accumulated such piles of garbage that they've gotten so high they block out any view he used to have of the peak. All of this makes me sad for Shaw, no matter how angry I am at what he's made of the program (which is very angry). The one thing that would make me take back this sympathy is if he is secretly colluding with powers-that-be to "demonstrate" that winning football is now impossible at Stanford. That always felt too conspiratorial to me but the more he coaches like this and the more he's allowed to do it the more I'll wonder.
3. Shaw's comments that he never makes excuses and then immediately talking at length about the defensive injuries and fumbles was comical, though I chalk it up to shell shock. My problem with his narrative is the same as every week - take out all the injuries and even the super negative plays like fumbles and we're still bad. Shaw talked again about how the offense plays well when it's not going backwards. Excuse me? The game was 21-0 before any fumbles had happened. Given our offense that means the game was essentially over before ball security reared its ugly head. Our first two drives were three and outs without "going backwards" on either of them. We just failed the good old fashioned way, by sucking, same as the vast majority of weeks the last several years. The fumbles and other errors Shaw talked about made the score even more lopsided but take all of that out and we're still not competitive. Obviously the fumbles don't help though. I chafe at any notion this is bad luck or episodic poor execution or even to some degree players trying to do too much. This has been a horrid flaw of the team since the Colgate game. We've fumbled 20 times this season. Twenty! In comparison, Oregon, Cal, and USC are all in the 4-5 fumble range and Washington is at 7. We are 130th in the nation in both fumbles lost and overall fumbles, with only Central Michigan keeping us from the last spot. This is who we are.
2. That being said, those who don't feel sorry for Shaw need to work on their empathy. This tarnishing of the legacy of an accomplished and decent man is brutal. It's painful to watch him process all this and gamely go before cameras and do the public-facing aspects of his job. He plainly doesn't know why he's failed or what he could possibly do to stop failing. In the press conference he talked about how ultimately he's accountable and how that's the easy part but the hard part is knowing how to get the most out of our players. To reach the mountaintop, tumble to the seas, and have no idea how to make it back to shore, much less start climbing again, must be excruciating. I have to imagine it's traumatic and, at a bare minimum, comes with coping mechanisms that border on the delusional. When asked about how the coaches are handling all of this, he offered a meditation on how all you can do is just do the job. On some level I think a coach I've always viewed as excessively deontological has coped with failure by becoming even more relentlessly, all-consumingly dedicated to a philosophy of "the means justify the ends." What else can he do but put together the game plan Sunday night, focus on fundamentals during the week, and appeal to the pride of the team to execute on Saturday? But another phrase for this is going through the motions. And I think that wears on even Shaw. It was startling to me to see him in the press conference forget Ron Gould and Kendall Williamson's names. Seemed like PTSD. Deep down I don't care how philosophical one is, a football coach can't sustain his soul on deontology alone. The mounting toll of the losses and the garbage ways they happen will weigh on anybody. To use another metaphor, after falling from the mountaintop Shaw settled at the base camp and accumulated such piles of garbage that they've gotten so high they block out any view he used to have of the peak. All of this makes me sad for Shaw, no matter how angry I am at what he's made of the program (which is very angry). The one thing that would make me take back this sympathy is if he is secretly colluding with powers-that-be to "demonstrate" that winning football is now impossible at Stanford. That always felt too conspiratorial to me but the more he coaches like this and the more he's allowed to do it the more I'll wonder.
3. Shaw's comments that he never makes excuses and then immediately talking at length about the defensive injuries and fumbles was comical, though I chalk it up to shell shock. My problem with his narrative is the same as every week - take out all the injuries and even the super negative plays like fumbles and we're still bad. Shaw talked again about how the offense plays well when it's not going backwards. Excuse me? The game was 21-0 before any fumbles had happened. Given our offense that means the game was essentially over before ball security reared its ugly head. Our first two drives were three and outs without "going backwards" on either of them. We just failed the good old fashioned way, by sucking, same as the vast majority of weeks the last several years. The fumbles and other errors Shaw talked about made the score even more lopsided but take all of that out and we're still not competitive. Obviously the fumbles don't help though. I chafe at any notion this is bad luck or episodic poor execution or even to some degree players trying to do too much. This has been a horrid flaw of the team since the Colgate game. We've fumbled 20 times this season. Twenty! In comparison, Oregon, Cal, and USC are all in the 4-5 fumble range and Washington is at 7. We are 130th in the nation in both fumbles lost and overall fumbles, with only Central Michigan keeping us from the last spot. This is who we are.
