Y'know what's indicative of this season? The fact that we have one more game to go and we're already deep into the off-season speculation.
I'm as much a critic of Shaw as anyone else here, but at the end of the day I am resigned to couple of stone cold truths.
1) There's way too much inertia, at the institutional level, and personally inside Shaw's head, to make significant changes. Ain't gonna happen. Institutionally, this ain't comparable to Buddy/Wlat, and Coach Shaw himself has really not shown any inclination to shake-up staff, roles, or approach. (I admit I have no clue as to the Turley departure.)
2) With the exception of Shaw, none of our staff have anywhere to go -- at least not upwards. Everyone says Tavita needs more seasoning -- but where's he gonna go? Not too much of a market for an OC coming off a 4-win season with an unknown role in playcalling. Akina has the resume but is in the autumn of his years. The rest?
On offense, there's a lot of in-bred DNA to this football team. Sometimes I think we assume too much about our personnel. Not every RB can hit a small hole like Gerhart and Taylor, and not every QB makes decisions like Luck and clutch plays like Hogan. We still take forever to get plays in, shoot ourselves in the foot with DOG penalties, and this is in spite of moving away from the clock-chewing TWU-led offensive game plan. We don't seem to have the 2000-page playbook any more, having distilled our game plan down to maybe a dozen bread-and-butter base plays, and we still can't always execute those well when it counts. Part of that is we see those plays succeed during the week in practice -- against our own slow, soft and sieve-like defense.
On D, we've got a couple of studs (Toohill, Booker) but generally just don't have the horses anymore. We all know what a crapshoot recruiting is at Stanford, for so many reasons. It's hard to point fingers because a Martinez or Skov hasn't appeared in the ILB pipeline. It's hard to point fingers at player development when the first 5 guys on our ILB depth chart were a converted OLB, a converted S, a walk-on, a converted lacrosse player, and a guy who's been injured all year.
And yet, here we are. A bitter pill to swallow, but it's not like no one saw this coming, looking at the schedule and the roster. The injuries just cost us at best 2-3 wins, not a championship run. And this was the greatest decade ever for Stanford football, and yes, we lived long enough to see it. But trends are trends, and regression to the mean is just one of those inconvenient realities.
You wanna feel better about the off-season? Don't count on any football news; I really doubt there will be any. The biggest questions between now and spring ball are:
a) Will WVB get it together and make a run to defend their National Championship?
b) Does WBB have what it takes to make a run at the Final Four?
I'm as much a critic of Shaw as anyone else here, but at the end of the day I am resigned to couple of stone cold truths.
1) There's way too much inertia, at the institutional level, and personally inside Shaw's head, to make significant changes. Ain't gonna happen. Institutionally, this ain't comparable to Buddy/Wlat, and Coach Shaw himself has really not shown any inclination to shake-up staff, roles, or approach. (I admit I have no clue as to the Turley departure.)
2) With the exception of Shaw, none of our staff have anywhere to go -- at least not upwards. Everyone says Tavita needs more seasoning -- but where's he gonna go? Not too much of a market for an OC coming off a 4-win season with an unknown role in playcalling. Akina has the resume but is in the autumn of his years. The rest?
On offense, there's a lot of in-bred DNA to this football team. Sometimes I think we assume too much about our personnel. Not every RB can hit a small hole like Gerhart and Taylor, and not every QB makes decisions like Luck and clutch plays like Hogan. We still take forever to get plays in, shoot ourselves in the foot with DOG penalties, and this is in spite of moving away from the clock-chewing TWU-led offensive game plan. We don't seem to have the 2000-page playbook any more, having distilled our game plan down to maybe a dozen bread-and-butter base plays, and we still can't always execute those well when it counts. Part of that is we see those plays succeed during the week in practice -- against our own slow, soft and sieve-like defense.
On D, we've got a couple of studs (Toohill, Booker) but generally just don't have the horses anymore. We all know what a crapshoot recruiting is at Stanford, for so many reasons. It's hard to point fingers because a Martinez or Skov hasn't appeared in the ILB pipeline. It's hard to point fingers at player development when the first 5 guys on our ILB depth chart were a converted OLB, a converted S, a walk-on, a converted lacrosse player, and a guy who's been injured all year.
And yet, here we are. A bitter pill to swallow, but it's not like no one saw this coming, looking at the schedule and the roster. The injuries just cost us at best 2-3 wins, not a championship run. And this was the greatest decade ever for Stanford football, and yes, we lived long enough to see it. But trends are trends, and regression to the mean is just one of those inconvenient realities.
You wanna feel better about the off-season? Don't count on any football news; I really doubt there will be any. The biggest questions between now and spring ball are:
a) Will WVB get it together and make a run to defend their National Championship?
b) Does WBB have what it takes to make a run at the Final Four?