[FarmBoy]

The risk of that approach is it only works as long as players believe in it.  If they come to see that it continues to produce losses, how long until the players start to mail it in?

EUTM worked because we had the wins to back it up after the first couple seasons.  But I wonder what would have happened had Harbaugh not rallied the team to win the greatest upset ever.

BC

EUTM worked because we had wins in the first season. Beating 'SC and Cal were landmark wins out of the gate for Harbaugh and company. I do wonder what would have happened had we not won those two games. A two win season in 2007 may have impacted a few key recruits and slowed our overall progress, but Toby was already on board as was Luck, right? Would be interesting to peek into that other universe.

Reading this thread triggered a couple of things I found interesting:
* It led me to look up the Stanford wikipedia page where I found that there is about three times as much space dedicated to the Harbaugh era as there is to the David Shaw era, despite almost twice the tenure and several times the 10 win seasons under his belt. Even if Shaw wins a NC, some people will say he owes it all to Harbaugh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_C...l_football
* The folks at BI continue to re-litigate whether Dykes or MacIntyre would have been the better hire back in the day. But they all seem to agree 100% that Wilcox is going to lead them to the promised land and so whether Dykes was worse than Mac, he eventually led to their savior. It's amazing how quickly they seem ready to go all in on a coach who's shown some promise. https://bearinsider.com/forums/2/topics/76616

[FarmBoy]

The risk of that approach is it only works as long as players believe in it.  If they come to see that it continues to produce losses, how long until the players start to mail it in?

EUTM worked because we had the wins to back it up after the first couple seasons.  But I wonder what would have happened had Harbaugh not rallied the team to win the greatest upset ever.

BC

EUTM worked because we had wins in the first season. Beating 'SC and Cal were landmark wins out of the gate for Harbaugh and company. I do wonder what would have happened had we not won those two games. A two win season in 2007 may have impacted a few key recruits and slowed our overall progress, but Toby was already on board as was Luck, right? Would be interesting to peek into that other universe.

Reading this thread triggered a couple of things I found interesting:
* It led me to look up the Stanford wikipedia page where I found that there is about three times as much space dedicated to the Harbaugh era as there is to the David Shaw era, despite almost twice the tenure and several times the 10 win seasons under his belt. Even if Shaw wins a NC, some people will say he owes it all to Harbaugh. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanford_C...l_football
* The folks at BI continue to re-litigate whether Dykes or MacIntyre would have been the better hire back in the day. But they all seem to agree 100% that Wilcox is going to lead them to the promised land and so whether Dykes was worse than Mac, he eventually led to their savior. It's amazing how quickly they seem ready to go all in on a coach who's shown some promise. https://bearinsider.com/forums/2/topics/76616