All this talk about USC and UCLA moving to the Big 10, how about Stanford moving to the Ivy League Conference. I mean with an endowment of $27.7 billion they are in the Top 4 along with Harvard and Yale. Let’s face it, Stanford certainly doesn’t benefit much from all this new found freedom players have to move to the latest big thing or sure thing and Shaw isn’t going to be able to turn around a team overnight through the portal like Lincoln Riley has. Everyone keeps saying that the lack of great coaching has never been the issue at Stanford. So, if David Shaw gets to keep his job no matter how many times the Cardinals languish in the basement of the PAC-12 Conference, and the academic standards are too high to pull in enough talented players to be competitive in a Power 5 Conference, they should join other like-minded teams like Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, etc.
That said, were Stanford’s standards lower from 2007 – 2010 when Jim Harbaugh was coaching? Harbaugh took over for Walt Harris whose 2006 team finished with a record of 1-11 and transformed the Cardinal to a 12-1 team with a trip to the Sun Bowl and an Orange Bowl win four years later. He orchestrated the greatest upset in college football history in just his second year defeating No. 1 USC with a TD in the final minute of a game in which USC was favored by 41 points. Harbaugh left to coach in the NFL and David Shaw was given the reigns of a team full of Harbaugh recruits which helped lead to 11-2, 12-2 and 11-3 records the next three years and two winning trips to the Rose Bowl and one to the Fiesta Bowl. The next year they were 8-5, 5-4 in conference and appeared in the Foster Farms Bowl. The last three years they are 11-19 overall and have started this year off at 1-3 overall and 0-3 in conference.
I don’t want to see Stanford or anyone else pack up and leave the PAC-12, but seriously, Stanford has had too many successes and great players over the years like John Elway, Christain McCaffrey, Andrew Luck, Jim Plunkett, Richard Sherman, Zach Ertz, James Loften, Toby Gerhart and on and on and on to let the mediocrity continue. With the Cardinal consistently able to recruit Top-25 classes year-after-year please stop telling me that it’s lack of quality players. As of December 15, 2021 Stanford’s class of 2022 ranked 14th in the nation and tops in the PAC-12. They ended up 22nd overall and 2nd to Arizona in the PAC-12. The question is are those players getting the best coaching that Stanford can provide? The obvious answer is no which is why David Shaw is on my Dead Pool list of head coaches that need to go along with Karl Dorrell—the sooner the better. But, I digress.
Against Oregon it was more of the same, down 10-0 after the 1st and 31-3 at the break. They had a much better second half, outscoring the Ducks 24-14, in a 45-27 loss on the road. Bo Nix had another terrific and well balanced game for Oregon connecting for 161 yards in the air and 2 TD’s while rushing six times for 141 yards and another couple of scores—picking up 40% of his team’s 351 rushing yards and half of their 4 TD’s on the ground. Stanford’s Junior QB Tanner McKee had almost identical stats in the air while connecting for 166 yards and 2 TD’s but the Cardinal rushing game never gained any traction on the scoreboard while picking up 127 yards on 34 attempts. Even with Oregon getting in their own way, tagged 135 yards on 14 penalties—including 10 for 90 yards in the first half—it didn’t seem to matter much.
After the game Shaw commented that; “Lost the first three games of our conference schedule. We’re gonna be better by the end of the year than we are right now. That’s the stance that we’re taking.” With Oregon State, Notre Dame, UCLA, Washington State, Utah, and BYU in your future this season, don’t count on it.”