[stupac2]

I think that at full strength, Stanford rush defense has improved to the point of being mediocre (in the "of only ordinary or moderate quality; neither good nor bad" sense, rather than as a synonym for bad). While the second half versus Oregon showed the run defense can be fine, the first showed how thin we are in the front seven.

Well, for the season our rush defense is still #10 in the conference. Even looking just at the Oregon game we managed to hold them to a pretty good... 1.3 yards over their average. (Our pass defense is hardly better over the whole season, #9 in the conference. It looked great against Oregon but it's hard to know how much of that was us vs them.)

You could argue that with our offense averaging something like 5 points/drive it hardly matters, we can afford to let the other team derp away a few possessions with penalties or other miscues, or take chances to get turnovers. Once we have a couple score lead and they get desperate we can really dial it up and make things look very bad. It worked against Oregon! But it's hard to tell if it'll work going forward, and it very nearly was catastrophic against Utah.

EDIT: I don't really know where to put this so I'm putting it here, but browsing our S&P Statistical Profile I see one defensive stat that we're really good at: third-quarter defense. In every other quarter we're ranked in the 80's for defensive S&P+, but in the third we're #12! I have no idea what to make of that, I'd say that it could just be random (with all those stats surely one is bound to be an outlier) but to be THAT far away from the others seems a bit much for pure randomness...

[stupac2]

I think that at full strength, Stanford rush defense has improved to the point of being mediocre (in the "of only ordinary or moderate quality; neither good nor bad" sense, rather than as a synonym for bad). While the second half versus Oregon showed the run defense can be fine, the first showed how thin we are in the front seven.

Well, for the season our rush defense is still #10 in the conference. Even looking just at the Oregon game we managed to hold them to a pretty good... 1.3 yards over their average. (Our pass defense is hardly better over the whole season, #9 in the conference. It looked great against Oregon but it's hard to know how much of that was us vs them.)

You could argue that with our offense averaging something like 5 points/drive it hardly matters, we can afford to let the other team derp away a few possessions with penalties or other miscues, or take chances to get turnovers. Once we have a couple score lead and they get desperate we can really dial it up and make things look very bad. It worked against Oregon! But it's hard to tell if it'll work going forward, and it very nearly was catastrophic against Utah.

EDIT: I don't really know where to put this so I'm putting it here, but browsing our S&P Statistical Profile I see one defensive stat that we're really good at: third-quarter defense. In every other quarter we're ranked in the 80's for defensive S&P+, but in the third we're #12! I have no idea what to make of that, I'd say that it could just be random (with all those stats surely one is bound to be an outlier) but to be THAT far away from the others seems a bit much for pure randomness...